New Books in Eastern European Studies
Interviews with Scholars of Eastern Europe about their New Books
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- Update frequency
- every 2 days
- Average duration
- 60 minutes
- Episodes
- 1142
- Years Active
- 2008 - 2025
Robert J. Donia, “Radovan Karadzic: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide” (Cambridge UP, 2014)
As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading about it in the newspaper the next day.The first geno…
01:07:29 |
Fri 06 Feb 2015
James Mace Ward, “Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia” (Cornell UP, 2013)
In his biography of Jozef Tiso, Catholic priest and president of independent Slovakia (1939-1944), James Ward provides a deeper understanding of a man who has been both honored and vilified since his…
01:14:07 |
Thu 25 Dec 2014
Mary C. Neuberger, “Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria” (Cornell UP, 2012)
By the late 1960s, Bulgaria was the world’s number one exporter of tobacco, perhaps the pinnacle of the place of tobacco in the economic, social and political development of modern Bulgaria. In Balk…
00:44:24 |
Tue 04 Nov 2014
Mark Corner, “The European Union: An Introduction” (I. B. Tauris, 2014)
Some say it should be a loose collection of sovereign nation states; others say it should aspire to be a kind of super-nation state itself. Or is it, in truth, a messy but workable mixture of a numbe…
00:43:41 |
Thu 16 Oct 2014
Willard Sunderland, “The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution” (Cornell UP, 2014)
The Russian Empire once extended from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan and contained a myriad of different ethnicities and nationalities. Dr. Willard Sunderland‘s The Baron’s Cloak: A History of th…
01:07:55 |
Thu 04 Sep 2014
Andrew Demshuk, “The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
At the close of the Second World War, the Allies expelled several million Germans from the eastern portion of the former Reich. Thanks to the work of many historians, we know quite a bit about Allied…
01:11:55 |
Wed 23 Jul 2014
Edmund Levin, “A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia” (Schocken, 2014)
There is a lot of nasty mythology about Jews, but surely the most heinous and ridiculous is the bizarre notion that “they” (as if Jews were all the same) have long been in the habit of murdering Chri…
01:07:16 |
Sun 13 Jul 2014
Sener Akturk, “Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (Cambridge UP, 2012)
What processes must take place in order for countries to radically redefine who is a citizen? Why was Russia able to finally remove ethnicity from internal passports after failing to do so during sev…
01:05:37 |
Wed 11 Jun 2014
Mark Levene, “The Crisis of Genocide” (Oxford University Press, 2014)
I imagine one of the greatest compliments an author of an historical monograph can receive is to hear that his or her book changed the way a subject is taught.
I will do just that after reading Mark…
01:13:40 |
Tue 03 Jun 2014
Geoffrey Wawro, “A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire” (Basic Books, 2014)
When I was in graduate school, those of us who studied World War One commented regularly on the degree to which historians concentrated their attention on the Western front at the expense of the othe…
01:00:47 |
Tue 27 May 2014
Anne Gorsuch, “All This is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad After Stalin” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Thirty years after a trip to the GDR, Soviet cardiologist V.I. Metelitsa still remembered mistakenly trying to buy a dress for a ten-year-old daughter in a maternity shop: ‘In our country I couldn’t …
00:44:22 |
Thu 22 May 2014
John Roth and Peter Hayes, “The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies” (Oxford UP, 2010)
We’ve talked before on the show about how hard it is to enter into the field of Holocaust Studies. Just six weeks ago, for instance, I talked with Dan Stone about his thoughtful work analyzing and cr…
01:03:58 |
Wed 20 Nov 2013
Jeremy Dauber, “The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem” (Schocken, 2013)
The first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and After…
00:45:25 |
Fri 08 Nov 2013
Robert Gellately, “Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War” (Knopf, 2013)
It takes two to tango, right? Indeed it does. But it’s also true that someone has got to ask someone else to dance before any tangoing is done. Beginning in the 1960s, the American intellectual elite…
01:16:56 |
Sat 05 Oct 2013
Dan Stone, “Histories of the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2010)
I don’t think it’s possible anymore for someone, even an academic with a specialty in the field, let alone an interested amateur, to read even a fraction of the literature written about the Holocaust…
01:01:13 |
Thu 03 Oct 2013
Luuk van Middelaar, “The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union” (Yale UP, 2013)
At the end of the 20th century, it looked like history was being made. After a century that had seen Europe dissolve into an orgy of bloody conflict not once but twice, the continent seemed to have c…
00:46:43 |
Fri 28 Jun 2013
Christopher Browning, “Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp” (W. W. Norton, 2010)
Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field: the intentionalist/functionalist discussion …
01:04:14 |
Tue 18 Jun 2013
Paul Mojzes, “Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the 20th Century” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011)
I was a graduate student in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved into violence. Beginning a dissertation on Habsburg history, I probably knew more about the region than most people in the US about the…
00:59:54 |
Wed 22 May 2013
Mary Heimann, “Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed” (Yale UP, 2009)
Americans love Prague. They visit and have even moved there in considerable numbers. They like the place for a lot of reasons. One is that Prague is a very beautiful city. But another is that the Cze…
01:05:43 |
Wed 27 Mar 2013
Eric Lohr, “Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union” (Harvard UP, 2012)
Russians have a reputation for xenophobia, that is, it’s said they don’t much like foreigners. According to Eric Lohr‘s new book, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard University …
01:00:19 |
Tue 05 Mar 2013
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