Judson completed his
BA at Swarthmore and his PhD at Columbia. He began teaching at Pitzer College
from 1988-1992, and then returned to Swarthmore as a professor from 1993 to
2014, where from 2011 to 2014 he was Isaac H. Clothier Professor of History and
International Relations. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, among
them Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, and a number of distinguished prizes for
his books, as well as for his teaching. His books include: Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics,
Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848-1914 (published by Michigan in 1996), and which
won two prizes; Wien Brennt! Die Revolution von 1848 und seine liberale Erbe (translated from the English by Norbert Schürer and published by Böhlau in 1998); Guardians of the Nation. Activists on the
Language Frontiers of Imperial
Austria, published by Harvard in 2006, which won three prizes; and The Habsburg Empire, A New History (published in 2016 by Harvard). In addition to his stellar scholarly reputation, Judson is also famous as a teacher and mentor to many in the field and beyond.
Interview Themes
01:00 Introduction
02:00 First contact with East-Central Europe; early interest
in history; the Netherlands; Smith College;
03:30 Road trip from Amsterdam to Istanbul in 1970, Vienna,
Budapest, Transylvania, Bucharest, Bulgaria, Istanbul
06:30 Interest in maps, geography, history, politics
08:00 J.F. Kennedy, 1964 presidential campaign, East
Germany, Hungary and first political memories
09:00 Eastern Europe, border crossings
10:00 Willy Brandt election
10:30 Swarthmore College, the 1970s
12:00 North Hampton, MA; parents professors at Smith College
12:30 “Hard time” to be a college student in the mid-1970s;
discouragement of political action; the Quaker traditions
14:30 Inspiration to study German; Exchange student at the
University of Munich, 1976-1977
16:30 Helmuth Schmidt’s reelection campaign
17:00 Attraction to politics
17:20 Fascination by the role of ideology in 1970s German
politics vs pragmatic US politics
18:00 1972, McGovern campaign,
junior youth delegate
19:00 The disappointment with the lack of political change
in the 1970s
20:00 Nineteenth-century politics
21:00 AIDS crisis ignored by politicians
21:40 War in Bosnia
24:00 Second book and arguments against nationalist politics
26:00 Cultures of nationalism and liberal politics
28:00 Reading nationalist sources against the grain
29:00 National indifference
30:30 Habsburg administration as umpire among political
parties
33:00 Divergent views on nationalism in historiography (i)
nationalism is not always problematic (ii) “not everyone is national”
36:00 Nationalism radically
different in 1830s, 1870s, 1930s
36:30 On nationalism and Prometheism
38:00 Interwar period as
validating the idea of nation-state
38:30 On Timothy Snyder's The
Reconstruction of Nations
39:30 The disappearance of empires as primary target of
nationalist mobilization
40:00 Nation and empire are not mutually exclusive and
mutually produce each other
42:00 Italy and Hungary as exceptions where the Habsburg
empire emerges as major opposition
45:00 Changes in the historical profession; Cold War
generation of historians tried to explain why Eastern Europe was a problem in
terms of imperial exploitation; consensus on backwardness
47:00 The expansion of East European studies, generation of
historians coming of age around 1989
49:00 Katherine Verdery
50:00 Graduate studies at Columbia University, István Deák, Eugene Weber, Robert Paxton
51:00 Research on Habsburg
Monarchy, learning Czech
53:00 Morals and historians, Jan Gross, Norman Naimark,
Timothy Snyder, István Deák
55:00 Identity politics in academia
57:00 1990s and the return of nationalism
59:00 Moral statements and judgements by historians
1:00:00 Identity politics, 1970s, 2000s as an era of
possibilities, Obama presidency, financial crisis
1:02:00 Habsburg Empire
– A New History and its current context; Habsburg Empire and the EU?
1:03:00 The military
dictatorship during WWI in the Monarchy
1:06:00 Graduate training at the EUI; the mission of the EU
and how Europeans are oblivious to it
1:09:00 The iron curtain, the “wall” in Berlin
1:11:00 Different generations of historians of East-Central
Europe
1:14:00 The Cambridge history of the Habsburg Empire
project, 23 historians from multiple states, Mark Cornwall
1:15:00 Caitlin Murdoch
1:16:00 Teaching methodology, passion for history and
narratives
1:21:00 Teaching at Swarthmore
1:24:00 The value of a liberal arts education
1:27:00 New research on East-Central Europe, regional
studies
1:30:00 CEU as crucial for the study of East-Central Europe
