Learning to Forget Empire: Habsburg Central Europe’s Global and Imperial Pasts

Pieter Judson, Professor of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History, European University Institute 

Global history has come late to Habsburg Central Europe, and when it has, it often tends to bypass the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. The newest nationalism that currently permeates politics, governmental policies, and official history writing may highlight some global histories, but it often does so in nationalist terms, while denying that the same national societies played roles as active agents in constructing, maintaining, and reforming empire. The lecture argues for new approaches to both imperial and global pasts in Habsburg Central Europe.  

Since 2014 Pieter M. Judson holds the Chair in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History at the European University Institute in Florence. Before that he taught for 21 years at Swarthmore College as Isaac Clothier Professor of History and International Relations. Judson has authored four books on the history of Habsburg Central Europe including The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Harvard-Belknap, 2016), which has been translated into twelve European and Asian languages. For ten years Judson served as editor of the Austrian History Yearbook, and he is currently President of the Central European History Society of North America. He has received fellowships from Guggenheim, Fulbright, the NEH, the American Academy in Berlin, Phi Beta Kappa, and in 2010 he received the Karl von Vogelsang state prize from the Austrian government for Guardians of the Nation. Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Harvard 2006). Along with Mark Cornwall he is currently editing the Cambridge History of the Habsburg Monarchy, and with Tara Zahra writing a book on the First World War in Austria-Hungary for Oxford University Press.   

Professor Judson’s talk will be the keynote lecture for the Twenty-First Annual Czech and Slovak Studies Workshop, which is taking place at UNC-Chapel Hill on Friday, April 29 and Saturday, April 30. For more information about the workshop, click here. 

This event and this year’s Czech and Slovak Workshop has relied on generous funding from the Center for European Studies; the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies; the Department of History; the College of Arts and Sciences; the North Carolina German Studies series; the Department of Music; the Department of German and Slavic Language and Literatures; the Czechoslovak Studies Association; and Vice Provost’s Office for Global Affairs.  

Questions? Contact Chad Bryant at bryantc@email.unc.edu.