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).