Zahra received her PhD in History in 2005 from the University of Michigan and has since published three books and won a number of prestigious prizes and awards. Her books include: Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Cornell, 2008), which won five prizes; The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Harvard, 2011), which won two prizes; and The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (Norton, 2016). In 2014, Zahra was also named a MacArthur Fellow.
1:00 Early interest in the history of East-Central Europe
2:00 Swarthmore College, Pieter Judson’s “Fascism” seminar
4:00 Interest in the history of everyday life, social class,
ordinary people
7:00 Literary interest in
migration stories
8:00 First impressions of Central Europe, Vienna, 1998
10:00 Czechoslovakia, France, nationalism
11:20 Pieter Judson as a mentor
14:30 Post-1989 generation of historians of East-Central
Europe in the US
17:00 De-humanization of Eastern Europe, national indifference,
schools of thought on nationalism
19:00 Nationalism and the welfare state; Two approaches to
nationalism in scholarship on East-Central Europe
20:30 “Debaters,” cultures of debate
23:00 Influences on her scholarship, Laura Downs
26:30 Vienna, Prague, European and comparative history
28:00 Trends in current historiography
30:00 The field of East European studies since 1989
32:00 Research on European history within history
departments
35:00 British vs. East-Central European history
39:00 The study of the Habsburg Monarchy as a window to
modern history; Schorske, psychoanalysis
42:00 Themes in Zahra’s scholarship; indifference; state
management of populations
44:00 Recent project on
de-globalization
46:30 Views on the Habsburg Empire; Pieter Judson; The
Monarchy as a functional modern European state
49:00 Habsburg exceptionalism?
52:00 Challenges of studying
East-Central European history
58:00 The Great Departure and current politics
1:04:00 The reception of The Great Departure
1:08:00 Digital humanities, history of capitalism,
environmental history
1:10:00 Differences among questions asked by British,
French, and East European historians
1:14:00 The training of graduate
students
1:16:00 The choice of dissertation topics; danger of
following trends
1:18:00 The recruitment of graduate students at the
University of Chicago
1:20:00 Areas yet to be explored by modern European
historians
