New Books in Eastern European Studies

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.

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Society & Culture
History
1101
Larisa Jašarević, “Health and Wealth on the Bos...
In her new book, Health and Wealth on the Bosnian Market: Intimate Debt (Indiana University Press, 2017), Larisa Jašarević traces the odd entanglements between the body and the economy in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the new post-war, post-socialist market,
56 min
1102
Eliyahu Stern, “Jewish Materialism: The Intelle...
Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) is a radical new book that uncovers a hitherto ignored intellectual movement in Jewish Eastern Europe, and finds new antecedents to the story of modern Jewish hi...
52 min
1103
William D. Godsey, “The Sinews of Habsburg Powe...
During the 17th and 18th centuries, Austria established itself as one of the dominant powers of Europe, despite possessing much more limited fiscal resources when compared to its counterparts. In The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a Fiscal-...
51 min
1104
Adis Maksic, “Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, an...
Within the space of only six months in 1990, the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) managed to win the majority of the Serb vote in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In his new book, Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect: The Serb Democratic Party and t...
51 min
1105
Andrii Danylenko, “From the Bible to Shakespear...
How does a language develop? What are the factors and processes that shape a language and reflect the changes it undergoes? These seemingly routine questions entail a conversation that involves not only linguistic phenomena, but historical,
49 min
1106
Waitman Beorn, “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe...
Most of the Jews and other victims the Nazis murdered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of the actual killing was done there. In his new book,  The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018),
95 min
1107
Wojtek Sawa, “The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Un...
Wojtek Sawa‘s The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Unheard (National Center of Culture, 2016) is a bilingual Polish-English project that engages with the intricacies of remembering and forgetting as part of the individual’s personal history,
44 min
1108
Anika Walke, “Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral H...
How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke,
61 min
1109
Erica Lehrer, “Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritag...
Sometime in the very early 1990s, while I was in grad school, I got a call from a student at Grinnell College, where I myself had graduated asking me about studying Poland. It was an engaging chat with a young woman very interested in exploring Poland ...
67 min
1110
Marie E. Berry, “War, Women, and Power: From Vi...
How can war change women’s political mobilization? Using Rwanda and Bosnia as case studies Marie E. Berry answers these questions and more in her powerful new book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia Herzegovina (...
65 min
1111
Steven J. Zipperstein, “Pogrom: Kishinev and th...
In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead,
48 min
1112
Ruth von Bernuth, “How the Wise Men Got to Chel...
In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Ce...
30 min
1113
Amelia Glaser, “Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competi...
The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name.
29 min
1114
Anna Muller, “If the Walls Could Speak: Inside ...
Today we talked to Dr. Anna Muller about her latest book, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University Press, 2017). Using archival research as well as oral interviews with many of the women in her book,
55 min
1115
Erin Hochman, “Imagining a Greater Germany: Rep...
In her new book, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Cornell University Press, 2016), Erin Hochman, Associate Professor of Modern German and European History at Southern Methodist University offers a new persp...
55 min
1116
Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny, “Russia’s Emp...
Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federation.” Federation of what, you ask? Well, there are a lot of people who live in “Russia” who are in important s...
74 min
1117
David Biale, “Hasidism: A New History” (Princet...
Who, or what, are Hasidim? A movement that was once mysterious and inaccessible has recently risen to the forefront of popular consciousness. Whether it be in last years acclaimed film Menashe, the Netflix documentary One of Us,
72 min
1118
Larry Wolff, “The Singing Turk” (Stanford UP, 2...
In The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford University Press, 2016), Larry Wolff takes us into that distinctly European art form, the opera,
41 min
1119
David Gerlach, “The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing...
In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Gerlach, Associate Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University,
59 min
1120
Laura Engelstein, “Russia in Flames: War, Revol...
Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale University. Spanning the pre-revolutionary period immediately...
63 min
1121
Omer Bartov, “Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life a...
One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are immersing themselves in the deep history of a small tow...
64 min
1122
Eddy Portnoy, “Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But ...
In Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017), Eddy Portnoy, Academic Advisor and Exhibitions Curator at the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Research, delves into the archives of the Yiddish press t...
35 min
1123
Sarah D. Phillips, “Disability and Mobile Citiz...
In Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2010), Sarah D. Phillips offers a compelling investigation of disability policies and movements in Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
44 min
1124
Joshua Rubenstein, “The Last Days of Stalin” (Y...
On March 4, 1953, Soviet citizens woke up to an unthinkable announcement: Joseph Stalin, the country’s all-powerful leader, had died of a stroke. In The Last Days of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2016), Joshua Rubenstein recounts the events surroundin...
46 min
1125
Jayne Persian, “Beautiful Balts: From Displaced...
In her new book, Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), Jayne Persian, a Lecturer in History at the University of Southern Queensland, explores the history of mass migration of 170,
16 min