The Hungarian Historical Review welcomes articles, proposals for thematic blocks (3-4 papers), and proposals for entire special issues (5-6 papers) in any topic pertaining to the history of the broadly defined East-Central and Southeastern Europe. Authors of articles are expected to submit their manuscript that consists of 8 to 10 thousand words (including abstract, keywords, notes, and bibliography). Prospective editors of blocks or special issues are expected to submit the titles and abstracts of the papers and a short summary that explains their coherence. All submissions shall be sent to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. More at Submission guidelines.
Call for Journal Articles
2023/3
The Hungarian Historical Review (hunghist.org) invites submissions for its third issue in 2023, the theme of which will be:
Medical Authority and Professional Power Relations in East Central Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Actors, Spaces, Discourses
The deadline for the submission of abstracts: December 15, 2022
The deadline for the submission of accepted papers: March 31, 2023
Over the course of the past few decades, many new studies focusing on the medical history of East Central Europe have been published, and today there is a growing body of secondary literature on the subject with strong theoretical underpinnings. A common thread of these analyses is that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, medical knowledge was presented as an authoritative form of knowledge in the context of the various tendencies of modernity, and this knowledge was given an imperative role in upholding social, economic, and political orders, both in socialist and capitalist societies.
From the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards, closer cooperation with the state has secured doctors an increasingly prominent and socially prestigious function. This has meant, as a consequence of various processes through which the state has promoted certain forms of professionalization within the world of medicine, that the knowledge and forms of expertise of medical doctors have stood out in comparison to knowledge and forms of expertise of related professions. For the state, furthermore, cooperation with doctors offered new means of enforcing regulatory processes. These phenomena have been partly interpreted in medical historiography in the context of macro-level changes in the relations of production and their translation into the meso-levels and micro-levels of society, consequently giving rise (and currency) to visions of the primary social benefit of medical activity as a means of ensuring a large, healthy, productive labor force and preventing threats to civilizational harms (such as physical or mental illness). This approach, however, also risks reducing the medical gaze purely to an instrument of state control.
At the same time, however, there have been overarching ideological, temporal, and geographical pursuits that have focused on maintaining and expanding the autonomy of the medical profession and developing the institutional background in which this type of knowledge can be exercised (e.g., the development of the standard forms of medical administration, the gradual emergence of hospitals and clinics as total institutions, and the increasing valorization of medical secrecy). These efforts have contributed to enabling everyday medical practice to function as independently as possible, allowing little or no insight to those outside the profession. An examination of these phenomena sheds light precisely on how the forms of social control exercised by medical professionals and their institutions are not formed by consensus but rather through a relationship saturated with social conflict, power imbalances, and, in some instances, conflicts of interest between the state, physicians, and their patients.
This special issue particularly welcomes papers discussing the following fields:
- healthcare institutions as spaces of professional advocacy and protection
- professional organizations and associations as sites of advocacy and protection
- medical authority and political advocacy
- the development of specific forms of medical administration (e.g., medical reports, statistics, etc.) as a covert claim to autonomy
- the use of medical language as a means of advocacy outside professional circles
- changing patient roles and patient rights: theoretical concepts and practical realizations on different levels of society and medical care
- inequalities in the doctor-patient relationship arising from differences in knowledge or social prestige
- gender issues in diagnosis, therapy, and medical work
- minorities, ethnicities, and the authority of medical knowledge (discrimination justified by medical knowledge, differences in access to care based on ethnicity)
- medical authority and different forms of funding and employment
Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short biographical note with a selected list of the author’s three most important publications (we do not accept full CVs) no later than December 15, 2022.
Proposals should be submitted to the editors of the issue by e-mail:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The editors will ask the authors of selected papers to submit their final articles (max. 10,000 words) no later than March 31, 2023.
The articles will be published after a double-blind peer-review process. We provide proofreading for contributors who are not native speakers of English.
All articles must conform to our submission guidelines.
The Hungarian Historical Review is a peer-reviewed international quarterly of the social sciences and humanities, the geographical focus of which is Hungary and East-Central Europe. For additional information, including submission guidelines, please visit the journal’s website: www.hunghist.org
2023/2
The Hungarian Historical Review (https://www.jstor.org/journal/hunghistrevi; www.hunghist.org ) invites submissions for its second issue in 2023, the theme of which will be
Forms of Medieval and Early Modern Diplomacy
The deadline for the submission of abstracts: October 15, 2022.
The deadline for the accepted papers: January 31, 2023.
Over the course of the past decade, the study of diplomacy has undergone a dramatic shift. New diplomatic history has opened the field to social and cultural history, anthropology, art history, the history of material culture, gender, and symbolic communication. Research has focused not simply on big peace treaties and epoch-changing decisions in international relations but also on the practices and actors at every level in different kinds of diplomatic encounters. In addition, medieval and early modern times present a particularly interesting period for the study of diplomacy, and not simply because, in the now classic and somewhat outdated works of Garrett Mattingly and Donald E. Queller, these were periods in which diplomatic work began to become professionalized and the modern resident ambassador became an increasingly prominent figure on the diplomatic stage. It is rather because, as recent works have emphasized, the context of diplomatic proceedings differed radically from the well-known classical world of equal and independent, territorially defined sovereign states, and the defined distinction of foreign and domestic, private and public, political and religious in diplomatic affairs. Medieval and early modern forms of diplomacy thus offer promising terrain for research on the individual actors engaged in diplomatic missions, the mingling of their private interests, networks of relations, and the aims of the political figures who sent them. Furthermore, forms of diplomacy in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era provide a chance to consider the ways in which diplomats’ religious and intellectual backgrounds enabled them to play the role of mediators between courts and cultures and the practices and rituals that were invented and shared by diplomats working in different contexts with little normative framework on which to rely.
The Hungarian Historical Review invites research papers that examine the social and cultural aspects of medieval and early modern diplomacy and its various forms, practices, and meanings.
The geographical focus of the issue is Central and Eastern Europe. However, we do not confine ourselves to the strict geographical borders of the region, especially in the case of comparative papers.
We welcome proposals from scholars at all stages of their careers pursuing work on any of the aspects of the questions raised above.
This special issue particularly welcomes papers discussing the following fields:
- characteristics of different forms of diplomatic encounters, from royal summits to the sending of envoys
- the staging of power at diplomatic meetings
- the various actors in diplomatic proceedings and their cultural and intellectual backgrounds, personal and familial interests, and roles as mediators among parties
- the functioning of cultural exchange in diplomatic encounters and the mediators in these processes of exchange, including relevant aspects of their contacts and their cultural and political backgrounds
- the mechanisms and creation of rituals and ceremonies, the messages they were used to convey, and the cultural, political, religious, and social contexts to which they referred
- the roles of objects in diplomatic proceedings, such as gifts and symbolic accessories, and their meanings and diverging interpretations of these meanings
- commemoration of diplomatic encounters in works of literature and the visual arts.
Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words and a short biographical note with a selected list of the author’s three most important publications (we do not accept full CVs) no later than October 15, 2022.
Proposals should be submitted to the special editor of the issue by email:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and/or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The editors will ask the authors of selected papers to submit their final articles (max. 10,000 words) no later than January 31, 2023.
The articles will be published after a double-blind peer-review process. We provide proofreading for contributors who are not native speakers of English.
All articles must conform to our submission guidelines.
The Hungarian Historical Review is a peer-reviewed international quarterly of the social sciences and humanities, the geographical focus of which is Hungary and East-Central Europe. For additional information, including submission guidelines, please visit the journal’s website: www.hunghist.org