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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1126
Michael Flier and Andrea Graziosi, eds. “The Ba...
Language is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individual’s awareness of self and other. However, language is also a tool for and of ideological battles,
37 min
1127
Bruce R. Berglund, “Castle and Cathedral in Mod...
As Bruce R. Berglund, points out in his terrific book Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague: Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age (CEU Press, 2017), the Czech Republic is an odd place, religion-wise. It’s among the most secular in the world,
59 min
1128
Adi Gordon, “Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intel...
Not very many intellectuals really change their minds about anything. They have a big idea, often become well known because of it. Then their big idea becomes an integral part of their identity and they just never let it go.
86 min
1129
Edin Hajdarpasic, “Whose Bosnia? Nationalism an...
It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav movements. At the same time, they all felt frustration with the Bosnian peasants for not living up to their ...
67 min
1130
Pieter M. Judson, “The Habsburg Empire: A New H...
Pieter Judson established himself as one of the top scholars of the East Central Europe with his first two books Exclusive Revolutionaries (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Guardians of the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2006).
57 min
1131
Alexander Prusin, “Serbia under the Swastika: A...
In Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Alexander Prusin delineates the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II. He starts from the medium-term background,
52 min
1132
Mykola Soroka, “Faces of Displacement: The Writ...
Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose dramatic literary career offers insights not only into...
48 min
1133
Max Bergholz, “Violence as a Generative Force: ...
People study atrocities and mass violence for a variety of reasons. When asked, many offer thoughtful intellectual or political explanations for their choice. But in truth, the field is a practical response to a cry of the heart. How, people ask,
73 min
1134
Scott Moranda, “The People’s Own Landscape: Nat...
The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new state and mobilizing the population towards its ideologica...
45 min
1135
Bruce O’Neill, “The Space of Boredom: Homelessn...
In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017) Bruce O’Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom.
19 min
1136
Adriana Helbig, “Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, ...
In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic costumes. Her curiosity about how these musicians came to be performing during the protests led to her ...
46 min
1137
Geoffrey D. Claussen, “Sharing the Burden: Rabb...
In Sharing the Burden: Rabbi Simḥah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar (SUNY Press, 2015), Geoffrey D. Claussen provides a thorough study of the life and work of one of the most influential figures in the history of Musar,
33 min
1138
Franz Nicolay, “The Humorless Ladies of Border ...
What is the punk music scene like in Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine, or Mongolia? Who listens to punk in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans? What kind of venues host punk shows? Punk musician and writer Franz Nicolay explores these questions ...
43 min
1139
Brigitte Le Normand, “Designing Tito’s Capital:...
NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17 At the end of World War II, Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia lay in ruins.
58 min
1140
Steven Seegel, “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: R...
Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Emp...
57 min
1141
Andrew Sloin, “The Jewish Revolution in Belorus...
In The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indian University Press, 2017), Andrew Sloin, Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York,
59 min
1142
Ana Miskovska Kajevska, “Feminist Activism at W...
In Feminist Activism at War: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s (Routledge, 2017), Macedonian researcher, peace-worker, and activist Ana Miskovska Kajevska analyses the way feminists in Belgrade and Zagreb reacted to the (post-)Yugoslav wars,
49 min
1143
James Heinzen, “The Art of the Bribe: Corruptio...
The Soviet Union under Stalin was very repressive. You could get sent to a GULAG (if not shot) for casually telling an “anti-Soviet” joke or pilfering ubiquitous “state property.” But, as James Heinzen points out in his excellent book The Art of the Br...
62 min
1144
William D. Prigge, “Bearslayers: The Rise and F...
In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for “nationalist tendencies.” However, the causes of their rise and their fall reached all the way to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow.
94 min
1145
Edward Westermann, “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the I...
The intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’t really think of the Soviet Union and the American west as colonial spaces.
58 min
1146
Ferenc Laczo, “Hungarian Jews in the Age of Gen...
For non-specialists, the Holocaust in Hungary is a history both familiar and murky. Many Americans have read memoirs like Elie Wiesel’s Night and Judith Magyar Isaacson’s Seeds of Sarah in high school or college and have some sense of their experience....
63 min
1147
Piotr Kosicki, “Vatican II Behind the Iron Curt...
Many historians have documented the Second Vatican Council yet virtually no attention has been devoted to the Catholics who found themselves living behind an iron curtain at the end of the 1940s. Piotr Kosicki’s edited volume,
64 min
1148
Ellie Schainker, “Confessions of the Shtetl: Co...
In Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817-1906 (Stanford University Press, 2016), Ellie Schainker, the Arthur Blank Family Foundation Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University,
38 min
1149
Edward Cohn, “The High Title of a Communist: Po...
Edward Cohn analyzes changes in Communist Party discipline in the Soviet Union from the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 through the 1960s in The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime published by Nort...
57 min
1150
Violeta Davoliute, “The Making and Breaking of ...
In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically representative case study of 20th century modernization and na...
61 min