As part of the EU CERV Avalanche Project, an international conference will take place in Thessaloniki from 21 to 23 April 2026, offering a space for dialogue among scholars and researchers engaged with themes of European memory, history, and citizenship..

Call for Papers

Voices of Liberation

Historical, Literary and Linguistic approaches to Testimonies in the Context of the 

Second World War

Thessaloniki, 21-23 April 2026

The conference is organized within the European project Avalanche (more information below).

Keywords:

Liberation – Occupation – Testimony – Voice – Agency – Memory.

Organizers: 

• Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) 
• Université de Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines – Université Paris-Saclay (France) 
• Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea di Milano (Italy)
• Mu.Bat – Museum of Battipaglia City (Italy)
• Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale (USA)
• Deconstruct Project
• Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI)

Place: Thessaloniki, Aristotle University 

Dates: 21-23 April 2026. 

Deadline: The deadline for submission is March 1^st. Participants will be notified by March 10^th.

Liberation is often narrated as a clear rupture: the end of occupation and the return of freedom. Yet, as Tony Judt reminds us, […] every continental European state […] was occupied at least twice: first by its enemies, then by the armies of liberation”. Taking this tension as a point of departure, this conference explores how liberation was experienced, spoken, and later remembered across Europe through testimonies produced during and after the Second World War. 

Bringing together a deliberately wide range of disciplinary perspectives – from historiography to film and media studies, literary studies, linguistics, translation studies, anthropology, memory studies, digital humanities, and related fields – the conference treats testimony as a privileged site where event, representation, and language meet. 

We would like to approach “liberation” not as a self-evident endpoint but as an act that generates contradictions: it ends one regime of domination while often inaugurating new asymmetries, new forms of constraint, and competing claims to legitimacy. In this perspective, the focus shifts to the voices produced under occupation or captivity and to the ways in which speaking, writing, recording, filming, translating, and circulating a testimony can itself function as an act of liberation – partial, fragile, and sometimes perilous – within conditions that restrict agency. 

We welcome proposals on (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Liberation as a contested process: liberation vs. “second occupation”.
• Testimony as an act of liberation under constraint (occupation, captivity, censorship, persecution).
• Voices under occupation: everyday strategies, clandestine communication.
• Testimonies from prisons, camps, forced labour and hiding, fragments, last letters, micro-documents.
• Narratives of liberation and its contradictions: reversal, revenge, disillusionment, “incomplete” liberation.
• Genres & media of testimony: diaries, oral history, records, reportage, photography, documentary, movies.
• Language & form: metaphors of freedom, euphemisms, hesitations, pronouns, agency and coercion.
• Multilingualism, translation and mediation: (un)translatables, editorial practices, institutional framing.
• Social reordering: purges, reprisals, sexual violence, displacement, return, DP camps and statelessness.
• Memory, commemoration: museums, anniversaries, education, conflicts of memory.
• Digital and interdisciplinary methods: mapping, annotation, corpus approaches, audiovisual analysis.

The conference will open (April 21^st ) with a hands-on Digital Humanities workshop, giving participants the opportunity for practical engagement with digital tools and methodologies.

Funding and Submission Requirements: The organizers are pleased to offer accommodation to all participants. Organizers will try to cover travel expenses, with priority given to PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers.

Submissions should include: An abstract of the proposed paper/panel (no more than 300 words) and a short biographical note (max. 150 words).  

Please send your proposals to: avalancheproject_thess@outlook.com

Scientific and Organising Committee:  

Andrea Szonyi- Zachor Foundation 

Andromachi Gkazi- Panteion University 

Carlo Bruno- Museo della Battaglia di Tunisi (Mu.Bat)

Christos Fotoglidis- The Ohio State University

Georgios Antoniou- Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Giovanni Pietro Vitali – Université de Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines – Université Paris-Saclay

Laura Brazzo – Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea 

Stratos Dordanas – Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Xenia Eleftheriou- Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki

AVALANCHE is a European-funded project under the CERV Programme (https://avalanche.europeanremembrance.org/), implemented by a partnership including MUBAT – Museo della Battaglia di Tunisi, Fondazione CDEC, AUTH – Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.

AVALANCHE seeks to connect global and local histories, with particular attention to the processes of liberation from Nazi-fascist oppression in the Italian and Greek contexts. The project aims to establish a collaborative platform involving applicant organisations, their partners and extended networks, coordinating joint research and educational activities related to World War II remembrance at European level. 

One of the project’s main objectives is to focus on women’s testimonies and language analysis related to historical events that have generally remained under-researched, examining their impact on communities and territories.