New Books in Eastern European Studies

The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Cornell UP, 2021) is a fascinating study of a crucial early modern cadre of "go-betweens:" the Istanbul-based diplomatic translator-interpreters, known as the dragomans. Blending a creative mix of quantitative methods, prosopography, and the systematic close reading of texts produced or translated by the dragomans, the book shows how, far from being simple intermediaries, the dragomans actively engaged Ottoman elites in the study of the Ottoman Empire, refracting the knowledge thus acquired across Europe.The book takes a three-pronged approach: it first focuses on the dragomans themselves, exploring how, particularly Venetian dragomans, were recruited, trained, and eventually grew to create an influential cast of subordinate elites enmeshed in both Ottoman and Veneto-Habsburg patterns of representation and consumption. The book then delves into different texts translated or produced by dragomans (relationi, translations of Ottoman charters, grammar books, and even pictorial representations) to examine the self-representation and mediation strategies developed by this specialized cast of interpreters. The final chapters of the book explore the legacy of the dragomans, notably how they contributed to the definition, in Europe, of a Turkish canon of letters that would coalesce into the discipline known as Orientalism.The Dragoman Renaissance offers two substantial contributions to our understanding of diplomacy, mediation, and even incipient Orientalism in the early modern Mediterranean. First, it challenges Eurocentric assumptions still pervasive in Renaissance studies by showing the centrality of Ottoman imperial culture to the articulation of European knowledge about the Ottomans. By studying the sustained interactions between dragomans and Ottoman courtiers in this period, Rothman, therefore, disrupts common ideas about a singular moment of "cultural encounter," as well as about a "docile" and "static" Orient, acted upon by extraneous imperial powers. Second, Rothman creatively uncovers how dragomans mediated Ottoman ethno-linguistic, political, and religious categories to European diplomats and scholars, showing how these intermediaries did not simply circulate fixed knowledge. Rather, their engagement of Ottoman imperial modes of inquiry and social reproduction shaped the discipline of Orientalism for centuries to come.Thanks to the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the e-book editions of The Dragoman Renaissance are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open and other repositories.Natalie Rothman, associate professor at the University of Toronto, specializes in early modern Mediterranean history, the history of cultural mediation, genealogies of Orientalism, and the relationship between translation and empire. She is currently continuing her research on intermediaries on The Dragoman Renaissance research platform Ian F. Hathaway, a postdoctoral fellow at the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), focuses on mobility, identification, and cross-cultural diplomacy in the early modern Mediterranean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge UP, 2019) by Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a summa of his lifetime study of Russian culture. In doing so, Brooks provides a needed corrective to the prior standard work, now over 50 years old. Firebird and the Fox chronicles a century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Dr. Isabella Wagner discusses her biography exploring the life of renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. They delve into Bauman's career in an authoritarian regime, his early life as a Jewish youth in interwar Poland, and his unexpected journey to the University of Leeds. The chapter also explores Bauman's partnership with his wife, Janina Bauman, and his impact as an influential thinker.

The fifteen contributors to Eagles Looking East and West: Dynasty, Ritual and Representation in Habsburg Hungary and Spain (Brepols, 2021) describe politics and representation in the Kingdom of Hungary from the sixteenth to the eighteen century. Hungary was part of Habsburg Europe under the banner of the double-headed eagle which flew from Spain to Austria and their many possessions. Coronations, funerals, patronage, diplomacy, and artwork reveal how the special relationship between Hungary and Spain functioned and appeared. In this interview, Tibor Martí explains the purpose, spirit, and achievement of the book, and he goes into depth about his own essay in the volume on the chivalric order of the Golden Fleece as an instrument of diplomacy between these great European Catholic monarchies in the Early Modern world.Tibor Martí is a Research Fellow in the Early Modern History Department at the Institute of History part of the Research Centre for the Humanities, in the Hungarian Academy of Science in Budapest and has been a lecturer at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in the Faculty of Philosophy and also the Faculty of the Humanities. He is author of dozens of articles and papers in English, Spanish, German, and Hungarian, all available at this link from Academia.com: https://tti.academia.edu/TiborMart%C3%AD.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Early Modern Europe specializing in sixteenth-century diplomacy and travel in Central Europe and the Spanish Empire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy (Cornell UP, 2020) Andrew C. Gilbert, who is assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. He discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identifies key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. Gilbert highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds.Drawing upon nearly two years of fieldwork studying in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gilbert’s probing analysis identifies previously overlooked sites, processes, and effects of international intervention, and suggests new comparative opportunities for the study of transnational action that seeks to save and secure human lives and improve the human condition.Above all, Gilbert’s book foregrounds and analyzes the open-ended, innovative, and unpredictable nature of international intervention that is usually omitted from the ordered representations of the technocratic vision and the confident assertions of many critiques.Christian Axboe Nielsen is associate professor of history and human security at Aarhus University in Denmark. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Bogdan Popa’s De-Centering Queer Theory: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War (Manchester University Press, 2021) seeks to reorient queer theory to a different conception of bodies and sexuality derived from Eastern European Marxism. The book articulates a contrast between the concept of the productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet and avant-garde theorists, and Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. The first part of the book concentrates on the theoretical and visual production of Eastern European Marxism, which proposed an alternative version of sexuality to that of western liberalism. In doing so it offers a historical angle to understand the emergence not only of an alternative epistemology, but also of queer theory's vocabulary. The second part of the book provides a Marxist, anti-capitalist archive for queer studies, which often neglects to engage critically with its liberal and Cold War underpinnings.Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

NB: This interview contains material about wartime experiences that may be upsetting to some listeners. When Alex Panasenko was born in 1933, his native Ukraine was devastated by Stalin’s program of mass starvation; millions were murdered and, soon after, millions more removed in Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1941, when Panasenko was eight years old, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded and he was deported with his family for slave labor. As the tide turned against the Nazis, Panasenko, now separated from his family, tramped westward with the retreating German army. The Long Vacation is Alex Panasenko’s war memoir, remembering the formative, often harrowing experiences that shaped his character.In this conversation, Mr. Panasenko discusses the extremities of life, death, terror, lust, and hunger from a child’s perspective, and with a child’s canny reactions aimed at survival, even when the prospect seemed most unlikely. With things falling apart around him—laws, governments, the conventions of the adult world—Panasenko came to rely only on himself. Consequently, as an adolescent in the chaotic period following the war, he became an astonishingly successful black marketeer in the liberated Bavarian town of Memmingen. Finally, Mr. Panasenko reflects on his life in the 75 years since the war, including his forty years as a biology teacher at Berkeley High School in northern California.Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Empire; he had the privilege of being one of Alex Panasenko’s biology students in 1993-94. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In Civility in Uncivil Times: Kazimierz Moczarski’s Quiet Battle for Truth, from the Polish Underground to Stalinist Prison (Peter Lang, 2020), Anna Machcewicz offers a powerful case study in the ethics and logistics of bearing witness in response to the two forces that brutalized Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century: Nazism and Stalinism. Civility in Uncivil Times is a biography of Kazimierz Moczarski (1907-1975), a Polish lawyer, journalist, and political prisoner. A major figure in the Polish Underground State in the final months of World War II, Moczarski is nonetheless best known for sharing a postwar Stalinist prison cell with SS general Jürgen Stroop, liquidator of the Warsaw Ghetto. After serving one of the longest prison terms in the history of communist Poland - eleven years - Moczarski reconstructed his conversations in forensic detail in a book published after his death under the title Conversations with an Executioner. Machcewicz’s book makes a major contribution to the scholarship on Stalinist political imprisonment, while also illuminating the possibilities for serious civic engagement in post-Stalinist societies.Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Three Cities After Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Place and Nature: Essays in Russian History (White Horse Press, 2021) is a collection of essays on environmental history spanning primarily the 19th and 20th centuries. Covering a wide range of thematic topics (water history, migration history and environmentalism) and geographic locations, this book provides new perspectives on the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them. This is largely achieved through the researchers’ experiences traveling extensively through the areas they study, seeing them as living places, interviewing inhabitants and marveling at the beauty and harshness of the environment they study. Join us as we talk with Nicolas Breyfogle, David Moon and Alexandra Bekasova about their journeys and research, how the two intertwined and how that granted them new perspectives on the Russian and Soviet environment.Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies