Project Description
The concept of a European identity is both important and largely overlooked when studying the genesis of the European Union. Understanding the undercurrents of this supranational organization’s top-down identity-making efforts is crucial to comprehending its current high-level decision-making, how policies emerge, and how they are framed and received by the public. Building on her elite-driven ideational identity-making model (Ostojski 2022), which shows that European elite leaders purposefully and repeatedly choose to implement transactional identity relationships between the European Union and its citizens, Dr. Ostojski investigates how the European Union’s founding fathers incorporated (or not) their ideas about the member states’ colonial history and responsibility towards their (former) colonies in the making of the Treaty of Paris and the Treaty of Rome, which constitute the foundation of the modern European Union. Her work on colonial remembrance by elite leaders and its connection to the founding fabric of the European Union contributes to a recently developing scholarship within European studies that emphasizes and highlights the decades-long institutional colonial “amnesia” (Cameron & Islam 2021), and which only recently has begun to thaw at the highest level in the European Union. By going back to the beginnings of the organization, Dr. Ostojski seeks to explain how such an “amnesia” was even able to emerge and persist throughout time.
Personal Bio
Dr. Jennifer Ostojski is a Visiting Lecturer at Bentley University and Framingham State University, teaching courses in International Relations. In August 2022, she earned her PhD in Political Science from Northeastern University in Boston, MA. Her work focuses on elite leaders in the European Union, and their impact on the making and shaping of this supranational organization’s identity. Her dissertation research investigated the European Union’s founding fathers’ motivations, ideas, and thoughts, providing a novel approach to how the conception of European identity is built. Additionally, she engages in the scholarship of teaching and learning in Political Science, concentrating on the creation, implementation, and impact of games and simulations about the European Union and its member-states. She has presented her work at national and international conferences.