Dr Klaus Richter has been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant, for the project 'Practices and Perceptions of Property Redistribution in Poland and the Baltic States, 1917-1934'.
Dr Klaus Richter has been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant, for the project ‘Practices and Perceptions of Property Redistribution in Poland and the Baltic States, 1917-1934’.
This project looks at the development of property distribution and its connection with state building in the former borderlands of the German and Russian empires following WWI – specifically Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. As these new nations consolidated state territories, they faced questions of ownership and demands of political, economic and social empowerment. This research will shed light on a neglected aspect of state building and offer a new view on the history of expropriations in Eastern Europe in the interwar period.
The £9,761 grant will enable Dr Richter, a Birmingham Fellow, to carry out research in Polish, German, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian archives, and hire research assistants to work with and translate Latvian and Estonian documents. Dr Richter will also be organising a workshop in Birmingham in June 2016 to network with other scholars working on property redistribution.
The two-year project started in April 2015 and will finish in March 2017.
