How Music Shaped the Habsburg Empire (Philipp Ther)
In this episode, Hannah Käthler (RECET) talks to RECET's Founding Director Philipp Ther, whose newest book Der Klang der Monarchie (Suhrkamp, 2025) tells the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the prism of the music it created and was shaped by. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were instrumental in holding the empire together. "Habsburg Pop" reached the masses and became a global export. The Habsburg Empire hummed, sang, danced, drummed, and only went under when its great musical means failed in the Great War.
Philipp Ther teaches Modern European and East European History at the University of Vienna. He has published five books in English, and his publications have been translated into various other languages. He has received several prizes and awards, including the 2015 Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair for Die neue Ordnung auf dem alten Kontinent, which was also shortlisted for the Prix du livre européen. Furthermore, his work has earned him the Richard G. Plaschka Prize (2006) and the Wittgenstein Prize (2019). He is the founder of the Research Center for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna.
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Between Duty and Survival: Wartime Masculinities in Ukraine (Sofie Rose)
Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian men of fighting age have been subject to a wartime draft. Yet many have chosen to flee the country, often risking perilous border crossings in search of safety. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Irena Remestwenski (RECET) speaks with Sofie Rose (University of Southern Denmark), who unpacks the emotional and moral complexities of male flight and reflects on how dominant wartime narratives seek to shape — and police — masculine identities in contemporary Ukraine. Together, they explore the implications of these tensions for postwar reintegration, gender norms, and Ukraine’s social fabric.
Sofie Rose is a political scientist and Postdoctoral Fellow in International Politics at the Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark. She works in the span between political science, sociology, and gender studies to explore complex issues related to reconciliation, social cohesion, and gendered inequalities, emerging within contexts of armed conflict. She has recently concluded a project titled “The Politics of Masculinity and Stigmatization of Fighting-age Ukrainian Men Who Flee the War”.
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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.
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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