Professor awarded Guggenheim research grant
Max Bergholz, assistant professor in Concordia’s Department of History, has been awarded a research grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to support his current project on local mass violence in Bosnia.
“It has been a goal of mine to win this grant, and I’m very excited to have done so,” says Bergholz, who holds the James M. Stanford Professorship in Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia. “I hope this grant will help to bolster Concordia’s status as a university with a rapidly expanding research capability.”
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation supports research into the root causes of violence and its mitigation. “Highest priority is given to research that can increase understanding and amelioration of urgent problems of violence and aggression in the modern world,” states the foundation’s website.
The competition is stiff for the foundation’s research grants, with only 12 to 15 awarded each year to researchers from around the world. Bergholz is the first Concordia professor to receive a Guggenheim grant, which provides $16,475 USD in research funding, with a possibility of renewal for a second year.
Bergholz, who is currently in Bosnia conducting research, says he plans to use the grant for his book project on the dynamics of violence and remembrance in Bosnia during and after the Second World War.
Bergholz is fluent in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. For more than a decade, he has been researching the history of the former Yugoslav region. His interest in the area developed during his undergraduate years, which coincided with the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
“At that time, a visiting professor gave a course on the use and abuse of history by the warring factions during those conflicts,” he says. “This sparked my interest, and a few years later I decided to learn the languages necessary for research. I travelled to the region in 2001 for language study, and I’ve returned nearly every year since.”
Bergholz also lived in the region from 2004 to 2006 while researching his doctorate at the University of Toronto. His doctoral dissertation, “None of Us Dared Say Anything: Mass Killing in a Bosnian Community during World War Two and the Postwar Culture of Silence” was well received.
The current book project is an expansion of his PhD research. “Through the prism of a community in Bosnia during and after World War Two, I’m investigating two main questions: What causes neighbours in multi-ethnic communities, who have lived in peace for long periods, to murder each other? And what makes it possible for perpetrators and survivors, who have committed and experienced atrocities, to live together again once the killing stops?”
In 2011, shortly after completing his PhD, Bergholz accepted the James M. Stanford Professorship at Concordia. He was also named vice-director of the Concordia-based Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS). “With every passing day, Max Bergholz confirms the wisdom of the search committee which chose him as the best of the best,” says institute director Frank Chalk.
Bergholz says a key component of his mandate as vice-director of MIGS is to work on expanding the institute’s scholarly research profile. Winning the prestigious Guggenheim research grant will certainly help in this regard, Chalk says. “Each new research grant and scholarly publication adds to MIGS's and Concordia's reputation as the place to study genocide and its prevention at the very highest levels. I am delighted by Max's latest achievement.”
Related links:
• Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
• Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies
• Max Bergholz