Making Bad History: CEES Graduate Students Examine the Power and Consequences of Contested Pasts

In March 2026, CEES graduate students participated in an international workshop, Making Bad History, as part of a course taught at the Munk School’s Centre for European and Eurasian Studies. An innovative approach that brought together scholars from across Europe and North America to confront one of the most urgent challenges in contemporary political and cultural life, the course examined the creation, mobilization, and endurance of “bad history.” Through a series of intensive presentations spanning two days, the workshop explored how manipulated or contested historical narratives shape regional identities, influence state policy, and structure collective memory across diverse geopolitical settings from Central and Eastern Europe to the Balkans, Russia, and the United States. 

At the heart of the course was a set of fundamental questions: What constitutes “bad history”? How and why is it produced? And what is the responsibility of historians when public narratives contradict academic knowledge? Through eight case studies, the workshop demonstrated that bad history is rarely accidental. Rather, it is often constructed deliberately—through state-sponsored memory projects, selective commemorations, pseudohistorical claims, and ideological mythmaking—to shape political legitimacy, strengthen national identities, or suppress inconvenient truths. 

The workshop opened with Gerald Lamprecht’s exploration of Austria’s transformation from postwar victimhood narratives to a reckoning with the country’s complicity in National Socialism, illustrating how national memory shifts in response to both domestic pressures and international developments. 

Paul Vickers’ discussion of postwar Poland highlighted a different dynamic: the negotiation between official narratives and ordinary citizens’ autobiographical writings, demonstrating how personal memory both reflects and challenges state power. Florian Bieber expanded the conversation into the realm of pseudohistory, showing how fantastical origin myths, supposedly ancient lineages, and viral misinformation circulate widely in the Balkans, often blurring with mainstream discourse. Artan R. Hoxha’s study of Albanian historical mythmaking followed, tracing how narratives of resistance, betrayal, and solitude have persisted across political regimes. 

The political stakes of history-telling were made starkly evident in Ulf Brunnbauer’s personal account of how scholarly inquiry into the mythologized Batak massacre made him a target of nationalist outrage in Bulgaria. Similarly, Heike Karge’s keynote examined the fraught terrain of memory politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where legal judgments of genocide coexist with powerful practices of forgetting, denial, and competing victimhood. 

On the second day, Alexandra Rahr discussed how Confederate monuments in the United States have constructed a nostalgic, distorted memory of the Civil War. A fascinating lecture, Rahr utilized monument photos, examples of “plantation fiction” literature and storytelling, to reflect on present day implications. 

Ioana Zamfir then explored Russia’s contemporary monument‑building as a tool of ongoing war propaganda blending Soviet, Orthodox, and nationalist imagery to legitimate military aggression and reassert imperial narratives.  

The workshop concluded with an animated discussion by Rob Austin where he provided students with an examination of Hungary’s evolving narrative of the Second World War. Austin focused on the government’s attempt to recast the nation’s twentieth‑century past through monuments, museums, and a controlled media environment. 

A bold and innovative approach to analyzing history, across all sessions a clear throughline emerged: bad history is powerful because it is persuasive, emotive, and deeply embedded in public space and everyday life. As they now embark on a final term essay, the workshop challenged students to confront these narratives critically, recognizing both their political uses and their human consequences and to consider the historian’s essential role not only in documenting the past but in contesting its misuse.