In this episode, Alexandra and Nina delve into the surprising results of the first round of Romania's presidential elections and examine the latest developments in Serbia following the collapse of the Novi Sad train station. They also discuss news from Ukraine and Russia and conclude with some uplifting developments from Northern Macedonia. Later i…

In this podcast, Albena Shkodrova, a historian at KU Leuven, speaks with Ketevan Gurchiani, a Georgian anthropologist from Ilia University in Tbilisi, about the concept of the city as an urban assemblage. Gurchiani shares her research insights into how the Soviet-era legacy of "camouflaging" and "doing as if" shapes contemporary religious practices…

The European Union has a big problem—a potentially fatal one. How should it deal with a member state or states that reject democracy and the rule of law? So far, not even Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has turned full-blown authoritarian. However, his 14 unbroken years of “illiberal democracy”, his constitution rewriting, creeping media control, challenges…

The Destruction of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland (Academic Studies Press, 2024) in Poland offers a comprehensive examination of the history of Jewish cemeteries in Poland, shedding light on an overlooked aspect of Holocaust history. Beginning with the settlement of Jewish communities in Poland, the book covers the establishment and subsequent destruc…

Was migration to Germany a blessing or a curse? The main argument of this book is that the Greek state conceived labor migration as a traineeship into Europeanization with its shiny varnish of progress. Jumping on a fully packed train to West Germany meant leaving the past behind. However, the tensed Cold War realities left no space for illusions; …

Johanna Drucker’s Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) uncovers the enigmatic life and work of Ilia Zdanevich, better known as Iliazd, a revolutionary figure in modernist art and literature. The book explores Iliazd’s journey from his beginnings in the Russian Futurist avant-garde to his later experiments w…

Between 1911 and 1912, Prague was home to Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka, two of the twentieth-century’s most influential minds. During this brief but remarkable period, their lives intertwined in surprising ways, driven by a shared intellectual restlessness and a desire to confront life’s most profound questions. Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert…

In this episode, Alexandra, Adam, and Nina discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, protests in Abkhazia, and the recent parliamentary elections in Georgia. They also reflect on the 35th anniversary of the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution and other key events of 1989. Adam and Nina are later joined by Leyla Mustafayeva, acting editor-in-chief of Abzas M…

In this episode, host Maryna Shevtsova, senior FWO researcher at KU Leuven, sits down with Alexandra Yatsyk, a researcher at the University of Lille, to explore the complex intersections of history, identity, and politics in Estonia’s public spaces. Since the start of Russia's war in Ukraine in 2022, Soviet-era monuments in Estonia have come under …

This podcast features a lecture by Piotr Florczyk, poet, essayist, translator, and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, on the poetry of witness. This form of poetic expression testifies to extreme historical and social events—war, political persecution, exile, and even the horrors of torture and censorship. In his talk, delivered …

In this episode of Madison’s Notes, host Laura Laurent sits down with historian Benjamin Nathans to explore his groundbreaking new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Nathans offers a deep dive into the history of Soviet dissent, tracing the courageous efforts of Soviet citizens who risked ev…

Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernisation, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) examines the history of the computer industry in socialist Bulgaria. Combining the histories of technology and political economy with that of the Cold War and the modern Balkans, Balkan Cyberia challenges the notions of bac…

In this episode, Alisa talks with Lewis H. Siegelbaum, who, along with J. Arch Getty, edited Reflections on Stalinism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2024), a collection of essays by twelve prominent scholars in the field who, after decades of study, reflect on the 'hows' and 'whys' of Stalinism as an authoritarian dictatorship determined to b…

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUqj40e3GDQ In this special episode which was live streamed on November 14th 2024, Adam, Alexandra and Nina start off with a roundup of the news, discussing Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan Georgia, Serbia and Albania. Later, they are joined by our guests Zsuzsanna Végh and Pavel Havlíček. T…

How the expansion of primary education in the West emerged not from democratic ideals but from the state's desire to control its citizens. Nearly every country today has universal primary education. But why did governments in the West decide to provide education to all children in the first place? In Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Educ…

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanisation of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurb…

In this episode, Lien Verpoest, professor of Eastern European and diplomatic history at KU Leuven, examines why heritage has become a central issue in Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine. This topic recently took center stage at an international conference in Leuven, where representatives from 15 universities worldwide gathered to discuss EU heritage d…

In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sits down with Cathie Carmichael (University of East Anglia) to talk about her new book with CEU Press, The Habsburg Garrison Complex in Trebinje: A Lost World. In the podcast we talked about the importance of Trebinje as a garrison town for the Habsburgs, the role of women in the town and the import…

Join us as we discuss Yaroslav Trofimov’s recent publication, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence (Penguin, 2024). We dive into the history of his journalism, the personal account of his reporting, and the ongoing war on Ukraine. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent m…

When we think of Nazi camps, names such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau come instantly to mind. Yet the history of the Holocaust extends beyond those notorious sites. In the former territory of Transnistria, located in occupied Soviet Ukraine and governed by Nazi Germany's Romanian allies, many Jews perished due to disease, starvation, and …

This episode of the EETN takes a deep dive into the recent Georgian Parliamentary elections and the fall out of the latest victory for Georgian Dream. Declan sits down with Dr. Anna Rekhviashvili, a PhD from York University who focuses on Anti-Gender and Andt-Feminist studies in Georgia and the Caucuses, to shed light on the rising right-wing popul…

Paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones--the Nazi empire demanded its population obsessively collect anything that could be reused or recycled. Entrepreneurs, policy makers, and ordinary citizens conjured up countless schemes to squeeze value from waste or invent new purposes for defunct or spent material, n…

In this episode, Kris Van Heuckelom, Professor at KU Leuven, interviews Mirja Lecke, Chair of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Regensburg in Germany. They discuss Russian imperial literature’s portrayal of colonized territories like Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine—called "Western territories" to obscure their non-Russian…

*Disclaimer – this podcast was recorded before the results of the US election were announced* In this episode, Alexandra is back and joins Adam with a brief discussion on the latest news in the region. First they discuss the US elections – recorded on election day – and what might the vote mean for Central and Eastern Europe, especially Russia’s wa…

Focusing on games that examine a range of national histories and heritages from across Central and Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern European Histories and Heritages in Video Games (Routledge, 2024) looks beyond the diversity of the local histories depicted in games, and the audience reception of these histories, to show a diversity of approaches…

In this episode, Adam and Nina start with the results of the Georgia elections. They also talk about Robert Fico’s appearance on Russia TV, Bulgaria elections and the political developments in Lithuania. Following the news, Adam and Nina interview Oktawian Milewski, is a political scientist specialising in Moldova, Romania and Central and East Euro…

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920). Čapek’s play invented the word “robot” and pioneered the genre of the AI uprising. The play - a clear influence on works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica – is a deep ruminatio…

Stefan Auer, Professor of European Studies at the University of Hong Kong, and Martin Kohlrausch, Professor of European Political History at KU Leuven, discuss the systemic obstacles that prevent the European Union from responding effectively to the war in Ukraine. In this intriguing, if not entirely optimistic conversation, the two academics exami…

Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels wonder out loud whether the bees are still swarming. For as long as the bees are swarming, the angels are reassured, the world holds together. Still, the tale suggests, the angels live in anxious anticipation of the End. Local beekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina retell the old tale with growing un…