Courses

This lecture course investigates the European world of empires and nation-states from the Enlightenment to contemporary illiberal democracy. We will focus on political, social and intellectual history of peoples and societies, who formed a unique anti- imperial space of ‘small peoples’ that preceded non-European anti-imperial and anti-colonial movements. Geographically, we will focus on social, political, and intellectual history of East Central Europe. The course closely investigates the relationship between empires and movements of self-determination; between the collapse of European land-empires and the rise nation-state; and the accommodation of modern nationalism by communist dictatorship and post-communist democracy. The lecture will introduce the seminal political ideas that formed a turbulent history of Eastern Europe: Marxism/socialism, living space or Lebensraum, race, genocide, peasantism and socialist modernization. Finally, we will study how ordinary Eastern Europeans experienced and gave meaning to these processes (Bohumil Hrabal, Herta Müller, Slovenka Drakulic) through the lens of literature, films and visual sources The course is intended for students interested in modern Europe, intellectual history, histories of empire, nation-state and communist state, as well as an array of Eastern European ‘peoples’ (Jewish, German, Russian, Ottoman Muslim, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Roma).