Department of History | The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 East 59th Street, Mailbox 85
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 834-2599 -- Office
(773) 702-7550 -- Fax
Email: tzahra@uchicago.edu

Field Specialties
Modern Europe; Eastern and Central Europe; Transnational and Comparative History; Gender, Childhood and the Family; Nationalism; Migration and Displacement

Biography

I am interested in transnational and comparative approaches to the history of Modern Europe. The focus of my research and teaching is Eastern and Central Europe, but I also look westward to Germany and France, in an effort to integrate Eastern Europe in broader histories of Europe and the World. I am particularly interested in the history of nationalism (and indifference to nationalism); gender, childhood and the family; humanitarianism; and migration in the 19th and 20th centuries.

My first book, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Cornell, 2008) is a study of Czech and German nationalist mobilization around children from the Habsburg Empire to the Nazi Occupation. This book focuses on bilingualism, national ambivalence, and indifference to nationalism as driving forces behind escalating nationalist tensions in the Bohemian Lands. I also situate Nazi Germanization politics in a longer history of local Czech-German nationalist agitation. Kidnapped Souls was awarded the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European History, the Hans Rosenberg Prize of the Conference Group for Central European History, The Barbara Jelavich Prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, The Czechoslovak Studies Association Book Prize, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Book Prize.

I recently published my second book, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Harvard, 2011). The Lost Children tells the story of Europe's displaced and refugee children in Eastern and Western Europe from 1918-1951. Focusing on national and international activism around children after World War II, the book explores how the reconstruction of families was linked to the development of new ideals of family, human rights, and democracy in post-fascist Europe.

I am currently working on a new history of emigration from Eastern Europe to Western Europe and the United States between 1880-1968. I am particularly interested in linking the movement of millions of people from East to West to emerging notions of freedom and social mobility, and to new forms of social protection and international activism.

Publications
Books:

Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.)

The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.)

Articles:

“‘The Psychological Marshall Plan’: Displacement, Gender, and Human Rights after World War II,” Central European History 44 (March 2011), 37-62.

“Enfants et purification ethnique dans la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales 66, June, 2011.

“‘A Human Treasure’: Europe’s Displaced Children Between Nationalism and Internationalism,” in Post-war Reconstruction in Europe. Past and Present (2011): 210 (supplement 6).

“Going West,” East European Politics and Societies 25 (August 2011).

“Imagined Non-Communities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review 69 (Spring 2010), 93-119.

“‘Prisoners of the Postwar’: Expellees, Refugees, and Jews in Postwar Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 41 (2010), 191-215.

“Lost Children: Displacement, Family, and Nation in Postwar Europe,” Journal of Modern History 81 (March 2009), 45-86.

“The Minority Problem: National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands,” Contemporary European History 17 (May 2008), 137-165.

“Each Nation Only Cares for its Own: Empire, Nation, and Child Welfare Activism in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1918,” American Historical Review 111 (December 2006), 1378-1402.

“Looking East: East Central European Borderlands in German History and Historiography,” History Compass 3 (2005) EU 175, 1-23.

“Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1945,” Central European History 37, (December 2004), 499-541.

Courses offered (past and future):
undergraduate:

Twentieth-Century Europe
East Central Europe, 1880- 1989
The Nazi Empire
The History of Childhood
History of European Civilization I & II

graduate:

Nationalism and Transnationalism in East Central Europe
Europe Unsettled: Migration and Displacement in Modern Europe
Gender and Sex in Modern Europe (with Leora Auslander)
Readings in Central European History

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Tara Zahra

Associate Professor of East European History
PhD University of Michigan 2005