“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are days when decades happen.” These words are often attributed to Vladimir I. Lenin, although he never actually said them. Nevertheless, they capture an important insight. Thanks to Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking discoveries, physicists have understood that time is relative, depending on the observer’s position and the strength of the gravitational field. Yet people have sensed variations in the passage of time for much longer. The variations have been the subject of numerous artistic and scholarly interpretations.

What, then, governs this mechanism? What agency causes historical time to move more slowly in one place/period and more rapidly in another? How are these moments of acceleration and deceleration articulated socially and politically? And what does an awareness of their existence mean for scholars of the past?

These and other questions will be explored in our roundtable discussion.

Chair: Piotr Kuligowski, Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Participants:

Augusta Dimou, University of Leipzig

Victoria Browne, Loughborough University

Cody Inglis, Central European University

Helge Jordheim, University of Oslo

Roundtable Discussion:

Paces of Historical Time: Social Perceptions, Political Implications, and Research Challenges

3 September 2026, 16:15-17:45

Venue: German Historical Institute, Warsaw

Fot. Bartłomiej Błesznowski (a clock with a 10-hour dial from the Museum of Modern Art)