David Gaunt

Biography

B. 1944. Professor of History at Södertörn University. PhD Uppsala 1975 with dissertation Utbildning till statens tjänst. Received a Woodrow Wilson National Scholarship, Thord-Grey Fellowship; Nordic Scholar. Member: advisory board for Social History; scientific council Center for Russian and East European Jewish Studies (Moscow). Large research projects: Explaining Inter-Religious Violence (Baltic Sea Foundation) and Kinship and Social Service (EU-6th Frame). Recently published Massacres, Resistance Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (2006).

Ongoing research

The project will seek to interpret how the story of minorities affects traditional historical narratives. This is particularly clear in the case of the Black population of the U. S. where the history of slavery and racial discrimination is increasingly integrated into textbooks. In Europe the experience of the Jewish minority is slowly being placed into national contexts. Similar integrative changes and general concern can be seen for the Saami, while the history of the largest European minority, the Roma, has yet to make a mark in the national narratives. Since the 1980s the writing of multicultural history has increasing bearing on the national history. The case of the Polish town of Jedwabne is representative. Here Poles killed their Jewish neighbours in July 1941. This realization has shattered the Polish self-image as an innocent society that did not participate in the holocaust. Critical debates over the eradication of minorities in Ottoman times are explosive inside Turkey. We can discern several forms of treating minorities: Multicultural in which each culture writes its own story with little interconnection. Tolerant nation in which there is a dominant socio/cultural frame and the minorities are subordinate. Ethnic-territorial Imperative in which state marginalizes the minorities within the territory that the state claims. The task of the study is to critically thematize and combine case studies with more principal arguments concerning the way politics and public debate challenge historiography.

Selected bibliography

Utbildning till statens tjänst. En kollektiv biografi.av stormaktstidens hovrättsauskultanter (Uppsala 1975) Ph.D. thesis,

– Familjeliv i Norden (Gidlunds 1984 and new edition 1996)

– Main editor for Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Peter Lang 2004).

– Massacres, Resistance Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Gorgias Press 2006) (also in Turkish translation 2007).

– Co-editor for Re-conceptualising the Pogrom: Anti-Jewish Violence in Eastern Europe (Indiana University Press (in press).