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
CV:http://history.uchicago.edu/faculty/CVs/ZahraCV.pdf
On Leave: 2009-2010

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

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, (the Habsburg Empire and Successor States), but I have also looked westward to Germany and France, in an effort to integrate East European history into broader histories of Europe and the world. I am particularly interested in nationalism and in approaches to history which challenge national categories and narratives; the history of childhood, gender, and the family, and the history of war and occupation.

My first book, entitled Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948, is a study of German and Czech nationalist mobilization around children from the Habsburg Empire to the Nazi Occupation. This book focuses on bilingualism, national ambiguity, and indifference to nationalism as driving forces behind escalating nationalist tensions in the Bohemian Lands. I also attempt to situate Nazi Germanization policies in Eastern Europe in a longer local history of Czech-German nationalist agitation.

I am currently working on a history of displacement and the family in Europe between 1918-1951. Focusing on international activism around displaced and refugee children after the Second World War, the book will explore the ways in which wartime and postwar displacement were linked to the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Europe, to emerging Cold War conflicts, and to the development of new ideals of democracy, human rights, and family in post-fascist Europe.

Publications
Books:

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

Lost Children: Displaced Families and the Reconstruction of Europe, 1918-51 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming.

Articles:
“’Prisoners of the Postwar’: Expellees, Refugees, and Citizenship in Postwar Austria,”Austrian History Yearbook (forthcoming, 2010).

"Imagined Non-Communities: National Indifference as a Category of Historical Analysis,"Slavic Review 69 (forthcoming, Spring 2010).

“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.

"The Borderland in the Child: Politics and Pedagogy Across the Czech-German Divide," in Localism, Landscape, and the Dilemmas of Place: Germany 1871-1918, ed. David Blackbourn and James Retallack (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 214-235.

"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, vol. 37, no. 4 (December 2004): 499-541.

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Tara Zahra

Assistant Professor of East European History
PhD University of Michigan 2005