Our assistant research fellow, Brigitta Schvéd, will deliver a paper on 16 July 2026 at the international conference Concepts of Freedom and the Development of Democracy in Great Britain in Historical Comparison. The conference will take place in Bochum on 16–17 July 2026 and is organised by the German Association for British Studies and the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum.
The two-day conference explores the historical development of concepts of freedom and democracy in Great Britain, as well as their broader European reception and comparative significance. The programme addresses changing interpretations of liberty, political participation, popular sovereignty, reform, and revolution from the medieval period to the modern era.
Brigitta Schvéd’s paper, entitled Public Opinion, Political Media, and the Language of Freedom: Conceptualising Liberty and the Balance of Power in Early Eighteenth-Century British and Habsburg Contexts, will be presented in the panel “Conceptualising Liberty” on the first day of the conference. Her presentation examines how the concepts of freedom and liberty were articulated in early eighteenth-century British and Habsburg–Hungarian political discourses, with particular attention to the balance of power, confessional identity, and the idea of European political order. A central case study of the paper is the British and Habsburg reception of the Hungarian War of Independence led by Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II. The presentation argues that the Hungarian case was not treated merely as a peripheral event in contemporary British political media, but formed part of broader debates on liberty, legitimate authority, and the European balance of power.
The full programme of the conference is available from here.
According to the organisers, the conference will also be accessible online via Zoom:
Cover: Haus der Geschichte des Ruhrgebiets, Bochum – the place of the conference. Source: Facebook