Entangled Lives, Loves and Ideas in Central Europe. Book Manuscript Workshop

On July 17, 2026, the Center for Urban History and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto organized a book manuscript workshop devoted to the new book by historian Marci Shore, The Truth-Seekers: A Story of Entangled Lives, Loves and Ideas in Central Europe (working alternative title: In Pursuit of Lost Certainty, a Central European Story: A Prehistory of Post-Truth).

The book traces the search for truth in Central European thought across more than a century, from Edmund Husserl’s first encounter with Tomáš Masaryk in Leipzig in the 1870s to the twenty-first-century rise of post-truth. Conceived as an epic, character-driven intellectual history rather than a conventional survey, the manuscript follows a wide cast of philosophers, students, friends, and lovers — among them Edmund Husserl, Tomáš Masaryk, Lev Shestov, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jan Patočka, Leszek Kołakowski, and Václav Havel — as phenomenology moves from a search for epistemological certainty, through the trials of two totalitarianisms and the revisionist Marxism of the 1960s, to the “anti-political” dissident philosophy of truth that helped bring down communism in 1989. Taking its central motif — spotkanie, “encounter” — from Józef Tischner, the book is organized around the meetings, friendships, rivalries, and betrayals that carried ideas across the shifting borders of Central Europe, from Leipzig, Göttingen, and Freiburg to Kyiv, Lemberg/Lviv, Warsaw, Prague, and Moscow. It closes by asking what, if anything, this century-long tradition of thinking about truth might offer a world now living through its own crisis of post-truth.

This was the first event of this kind held at the Center for Urban History. A book manuscript workshop is a particular form of scholarly gathering in which an author shares a work still in progress with a small group of colleagues in order to receive sustained, close-grained feedback before the manuscript goes to press. Rather than a conference of individual papers, the program is organized entirely around a single manuscript. Thus, during the workshop, Marci Shore presented the book’s key story lines and arguments, after which participants — historians, philosophers, and scholars from Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Warsaw, Frankfurt (Oder), Dublin, New Haven, and New York — offered rounds of comments and discussion over the course of the day.

Participants:

Caroline Albright (Yale University / Lviv Media Forum), Daria Badior (re/visions), Miglė Bareikytė (European University Viadrina), Orysya Bila (Ukrainian Catholic University), Sofia Dyak (Center for Urban History), Andrzej Gniazdowski (Polish Academy of Sciences), Izabela Kalinowska-Blackwood (Stony Brook University), Vakhtang Kebuladze (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv), Olena Lennon (University of New Haven), Kateryna Levchuk (Kyiv School of Economics), Tanya Lokot (Dublin City University), Yurko Prokhasko (Ivan Franko Institute, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; PEN Ukraine), Marci Shore (Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto), Bohdan Shumylovych (Ukrainian Catholic University / Center for Urban History), Volodymyr Sklokin (Ukrainian Catholic University), and Pavlo Yeremeev (V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University).

The workshop was co-prganized by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto and the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe.

Organizing team:

• Marci Shore (Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto), concept and program
• Sofia Dyak (Center for Urban History), concept and program
• Anastasiia Fabirovska (Center for Urban History), coordination and logistics
• Ines Mahiou (Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto), coordination and financial administration
• Yelyzaveta Bobrova (Center for Urban History), communication
• Yaryna Paniv (Center for Urban History), financial administration

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Credits

Cover Image: Olena Lennon

Gallery: Sofia Dyak