NOS-HS Project "Historical Trauma Studies" gathers an international group of historians, cultural studies scholars, social scientists, psychologists, literary scholars, ethnologists and psychiatrists, who all study traumatic experiences as a historical phenomenon. Our aim is to bring the contribution of social sciences and humanities to trauma research and thus to develop transnational, comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. By emphasizing historical and cultural variation in traumatic experiences, the project participates in discussions on the nature of trauma and produces critical knowledge on the different ways to experience and treat trauma.
The project's empirical focus is especially on the Second World War and its aftermath in Eastern, Central and Northern Europe. Most of the violence in Europe in 1939-45 took place in this area and it was often suffered rather by civilians than by soldiers. Yet the earlier historical trauma research has mostly centered on soldiers' experiences in Western Europe during the First World War. The expansion of historical trauma studies to new groups of people, time periods, geographical locations and scholarly disciplines will mean a re-evaluation of earlier research results and an introduction of fresh interpretations.
"Historical Trauma Studies" is financed by the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS). The project is led by Dr Ville Kivimäki from the Tampere University and its partners are the University of Copenhagen, Lund University and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. The project organizes three workshops: in Tampere, Finland (2018), Trondheim, Norway (2019), and Gdansk, Poland (2020).