The disputed Austro-Hungarian Border (Hannes Grandits, Katharina Tyran)
In the aftermath of World War I, what used to be the Habsburg Empire split up into several nation states. But where to draw a border between the new Austrian Republic and the Hungarian nation state? In this episode, Leonid Motz (RECET) speaks with Hannes Grandits (HU Berlin) and Katharina Tyran (University of Helsinki) about their new edited volume The Disputed Austro-Hungarian Border: Agendas, Actors, and Practices in Western Hungary/Burgenland after World War I (with Ibolya Murber, published with Berghahn). They highlight how border-making was contested, negotiated, and experienced on the ground in one of the former Empire’s most multiethnic and multilingual regions—and what these debates reveal about nation‑state formation, identity, and transnational continuities in post‑1918 Central Europe.
Hannes Grandits is Professor of Southeast European History at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Katharina Tyran is Associated Professor in Slavic Philology at the University of Helsinki.
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Everyday Postsocialism (Jill Massino)
What is postsocialism and how has it been experienced around Eastern Europe? Ambiguously, according to Jill Massino, the editor, with Marcus Wien, of a new volume on the topic: Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe: History Doesn’t Travel in One Direction (Purdue University Press, 2024). From white-collar workers whose fates diverged, to sexual minorities who enjoyed some years of unprecedented openness and recognition before policy reversals wiped out perceived gains, Massino reflects upon the “complexity of experience” of this period, concluding, therefore, that history does not move in one direction. By foregrounding the perspectives of non-elites whose complaints about the present are sometimes dismissed as “nostalgic,” we might better understand, Massino suggests, the frustrations harnessed by populists today.
Jill Massino is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the author of Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania and coeditor of Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe.
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Socialist Tropical Medicine (Bogdan C. Iacob)
Is there socialist tropical medicine? Why is it important to write state-socialist Eastern Europe in the global history of medicine after 1945? In this episode, Bogdan Iacob tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about socialist tropical medicine, its development, purposes and understanding within Eastern Europe. He explains how state-socialist Eastern Europe shaped the assistance to postcolonial states and WHO programs and what discourses and hierarchies emerged in this context.
Bogdan C. Iacob is a historian working at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History at the Romanian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His work centres on the role of Eastern European experts in international organisations and post-colonial spaces, and he has contributed to the shifting of paradigm in transnational and global history of medicine, with Eastern Europe in focus.
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Transformations of Terrorism (Daniela Richterova)
Did Eastern Bloc states “aid and abet” terrorism, as US politicians like Ronald Reagan charged? Declassified archives in postsocialist Europe reveal a much more complicated story, as Daniela Richterova (King’s College London) explains. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, she tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) how Czechoslovak officials could “talk and at times align” with violent non-state actors such as Carlos the Jackal and Abu Nidal, while never themselves orchestrating attacks and maintaining throughout such negotiations “clear red lines.” Reflecting upon the ways in which terrorist tactics changed over time, Richterova lays bare both the dynamism and prudence employed by Czechoslovak officials when dealing with those she terms “jackals.”
Daniela Richterova is a senior lecturer in intelligence studies at the department of war studies, King’s College London. Her first book, Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries appeared with Georgetown University Press in 2025. She has also published in International Affairs, The International History Review, West European Politics, and Intelligence and National Security.
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Historian in the Age of Social Media and Disinformation (Franziska Davies)
Do historians have a responsibility to engage in public and political discussions? How can one balance the role of a public intellectual, an activist and a scholar? How can scholars rise to the occasion in the face of a changing media world and widespread disinformation campaigns? Can their institutions protect them from attempts to silence them through SLAPP suits (Strategic lawsuits against public participation)? In the field of Eastern European History, these questions have become particularly urgent after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Some scholars have chosen to speak out; others have chosen to remain silent. But in face of the dismantling of democracy in the United States and the rise of anti-democratic parties and movements in Europe, can we afford silence?
Listen to the whole conversation on our YouTube channel.
Franziska Davies is an assistant professor of Eastern European History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and is currently a visiting fellow at the IWM in Vienna. She specialises in the modern history of Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. She is currently working on a book about the end of the Soviet Union from a Ukrainian-Polish perspective.
Welcome to the Transformative Podcast, which takes the year 1989 as a starting point to think about social, economic, and cultural transformations on a European and global scale.
This podcast is produced by the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) and its managing director Irena Remestwenski. Our patron is Philipp Ther, and we could not do it without Leonid Motz, Jannis Panagiotidis, Rosamund Johnston, Sheng Peng, and Jelena Dureinovic.
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