Interview with Vangelis Kechriotis--June 22, 2011

Interview with Vangelis Kechriotis of the History faculty at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. Interview conducted in Istanbul, Turkey on June 22, 2011.

Kechriotis specializes in late Ottoman history, Christian and Jewish communities in the Balkans and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, nationalism, and Ottoman urban history and imperial ideology. His dissertation, completed in 2005, is entitled: "The Greeks of Izmir at the end of the Empire a non-Muslim Ottoman Community between autonomy and Patriotism." 

Interview Themes

PART I

On how Kechriotis came to study late Ottoman history (1:30)
Why Greeks became more interested in Ottoman history after 1999/2000 (8:20)
On the fruit of the recent convergence of young Greek and Turkish scholars on late Ottoman history (12:00)
Kechriotis’ take on how Greeks and Turks relate to that history and his work on Izmir (16:05)
Can a good historian do politics? Is there a politics that allows for the inclusion of detail? (41:05)

PART II

What is the historian's role in bringing societies to a meaningful engagement with their past (0:00)
How we should be training the next generation of historians in the field (6:55)
Kechriotis' long-term scholarly agenda (13:40)
To access the interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/30797

Interview with James Ward--March 22, 2012

Interview with James Ward, scholar of modern East-Central European history and lecturer of modern European history at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Interview conducted in Belfast, Northern Ireland on March 22, 2012. 

James is the author of the forthcoming book Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia. Tiso was the priest-president of wartime Slovakia. That book is coming out with Cornell University Press sometime in spring of 2013. 

Interview Themes

How Ward came to work on Jozef Tiso (1:18) 

How Ward's biography of Tiso developed over time (5:10)

On Ward's historical interests beyond East-Central Europe, including Manila in the Philippines (15:45)

Ward's next project on the East-Central European history of expropriation (22:58)

Ward on what should be happening in the field of East-Central European history (27:36)

On teaching East-Central European and Russian/Soviet history in Belfast (30:15)

To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/30796

Interview with Balázs Apor--March 23, 2012

Interview with Balázs Apor, Director of the MPhil program in European Studies at Trinity College Dublin. Interview conducted in Dublin, Ireland on March 23, 2012. 

Balázs Apor specializes in the history of East-Central Europe under communism, especially on the leader cult. He has co-edited two volumes, including The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (2004), and The Sovietization of Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on the Postwar Period (2008). He is currently at work on a monograph on the leader cult of the Hungarian Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi. 

Interview Themes   

How Apor came to the study of communist leader cults (1:00) 

How Apor's view of Rákosi and the leader cult has changed since starting work on it (2:20)
How the assessment of Rákosi’s legacy has changed (or not) since 1956 (4:00)

On the inadequacy of the term "cult of personality" versus "leader cult" (7:45)
On the challenges of doing research on Rákosi's leader cult and what Apor found in his research that surprised him (11:15)

The extent to which people were willing participants in leader cults and why (18:30) 
Comparison of Rákosi to other leaders like Miklós Horthy and Imre Nagy in terms of leader cults (29:25)

On whether writing about the leader cult speaks to how Hungarians come to terms with their own history (45:15) 

On teaching East-Central European history in Ireland and where the field is headed (49:05)

To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/30795