Cold War Archives and Religion: Methodologies in Hidden, Secret, and Silenced Archives

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores the methodological opportunities and challenges of researching religion in Cold War archives. The three papers, which present case studies from Romania, Hungary and the Ukrainian minority in Poland, address various forms of entanglement between different types of archives that were either hidden, secret, stolen or silenced by the state or other actors. The papers place archives in dialogue that represent opposing truth regimes and conflicting values; Romanian state security archives and Vatican archives, the archive of a sociologist of religion in 1970s and 80s Hungary and that of the Hungarian state security, and local Greek Catholic Church archives with personal collections and memories of the community. Highlighting the diversity of archival sources available to scholars of religions and the complementary approaches and methodologies that scholars can apply, the three case studies address material and visual methods, archival silences and memory, and competing truth claims and evidential regimes.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• Cristina Vatulescu, New York U

Papers

• The Last Few Months of His Excellency Gerald P. O’Hara Papal Representative in Communist Romania in Three 'Cold War' Archives - Anca Maria Sincan, Romanian Academy (Romania)

• Encountering Materialities: Making Cold War Archival Collections Evidential for the Study of Religions - James Kapalo, U College Cork (Ireland)

• The Silence of People and Archives: Researching Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Poland - Iuliia Julia Buyskykh, U College Cork (Ireland) / German Historical Institute (Poland) / Institute of History, PAS (Poland)

Discussant

• Julie K. deGraffenried, Baylor U