CANR
WORK TITLE: AGAINST THE WORLD
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Chicago
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 325
http://history.uchicago.edu/faculty/zahra.shtml * http://www.tnr.com/book/review/lost-children-tara-zahra * http://wwww.irishrover.net/archives/1321 * https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/tara-zahra
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 3, 1976; daughter of Marc and Debbie Zahra.
EDUCATION:Swarthmore College, B.A., 1998; University of Michigan, M.A., 2002, Ph.D., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, historian, scholar, and educator. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, assistant professor, 2007-11, associate professor, 2011-13, beginning professor of East European history, 2013, then Homer J. Livingston Professor of East European History and the College, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Roman Family Director.
AVOCATIONS:Dance, ballet.
MEMBER:American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Phi Beta Kappa.
AWARDS:Andrew S. Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 1999-2000; Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship, 2002-03; Distinguished Dissertation Award, University of Michigan, 2005; Harvard Society of Fellows, fellow, 2005-07; Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European History, Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame, 2011; Hans Rosenberg Prize, Conference Group for Central European History, 2011; Barbara Jelavich Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 2011; Book Prize, Czechoslovak Studies Association, 2011; Book Prize, Austrian Cultural Forum, 2011; George Louis Beer Prize, 2012; Radomir Luza Prize, 2012; Berlin Prize, American Academy in Berlin, 2013-14; American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2013-14; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2013-14; Fernand Braudel Fellowship, European University Institute, 2014; MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 2014.
WRITINGS
Contributor to journals, including American Historical Review, Austrian History Yearbook, Central European History, Contemporary European History, East European Politics and Societies, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, German History, and History Compass.
SIDELIGHTS
Tara Zahra is an award-winning historian, academic, and MacArthur Fellowship recipient. She eventually became a history professor at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as transnational modern history. In particular, Zahra explores these topics in the context of children, humanitarianism, ethnicity, and migration.
(open new1)In an interview in History News Network, Zahra spoke with Erik Moshe about how she came to be a historian professionally. Zahra admitted that she had “always been drawn to history at an imaginative level (I read a lot of historical fiction growing up). But I didn’t think of history as a potential career until my senior year at Swarthmore when I was taking a course on fascism with Pieter Judson…. That was when I realized I might be interested enough in history to keep at it for a long time. I think I was drawn to the unique way that history enables you to combine storytelling with political and social analysis.”(close new1)
Zahra teaches courses related to her interests, including twentieth-century Europe, the Nazi empire, and the history of childhood. Zahra’s articles have been published in scholarly journals such as the American Historical Review, Austrian History Yearbook, Central European History, Contemporary European History, East European Politics and Societies, Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, and History Compass. Zahra’s books include Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948; The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II; The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World, and Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics between the World Wars.
In an interview on American Historical Association website, Zahra expressed her satisfaction with her choice to take up history as a profession. “I value almost everything about it. I feel incredibly lucky to have a career that enables me to write, teach, travel, and do research. I still get a thrill out of archives—every box of documents seems like a wrapped present that could have something great inside,” she stated in the interview. She also believes that studying and writing about history gives her the opportunity to address topics with real-world applications to modern social issues and political problems.
Kidnapped Souls
Kidnapped Souls received several awards, including the Laura Shannon Prize from the Nanovic Institute, and grew out of Zahra’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan. The book examines residents along the Czech-German border in the first half of the twentieth century. Most residents of Bohemia shared customs and languages early in the twentieth century, but with the rise of nationalism, both countries focused on how to increase a singular national identity among these residents, starting with the children. However, as Zahra details, both countries met resistance. When the Nazis pressed residents to apply for German citizenship, for instance, they were flummoxed by the resistance they encountered from German-speaking Bohemians and Moravians, while thousands of Czech-speakers took the Nazis up on their offer. According to Zahra, this is one example of how nationalism affected child-rearing at the time, as German school officials were suddenly faced with a huge influx of Czech-speaking students in their all-German-language classrooms.
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online reviewer Eagle Glassheim called Kidnapped Souls a “finely researched, engagingly written book.” Canadian Journal of History reviewer Nazan Maksudyan commented: “ Kidnapped Souls is not only an excellent book for providing the history of the essentially invisible actors (children), but is also an exceptional achievement in writing the history of an absence (indifference to nationalism).”
The Lost Children
Zahra’s next book, The Lost Children, also focuses on children. Throughout the twentieth century, but especially during World War II and its aftermath, Europeans concerned themselves with the welfare of children displaced by war and other events. The book describes efforts between 1918 and 1951 to look out for orphans and displaced children across Europe. Here, too, Zahra indicates that nationalism was a thinly veiled concern, with Jewish groups arguing that the Jewish orphans of World War II needed to be raised either by Jewish families or on Kibbutzes, with similar logic being espoused by psychologists concerning children of all nationalities. These arguments became more fraught when the children in consideration had been raised during conflict or wartime by families of a different ethnic or national group. Zahra also argues that contemporary society’s intense focus on child-rearing by proximity, such as co-sleeping, breastfeeding, and carrying one’s infant as close to one’s body as possible, arose from these wartime traumas and their aftermath.
New Republic reviewer Mark Mazower described The Lost Children as a “fascinating book” and “an important contribution to the growing literature on Europe’s reconstruction after World War II.” Tablet contributor Adam Kirsch called the book “superb” and a “wide-ranging, exceptionally well-researched study.”
The Great Departure
In The Great Departure, Zahra covers the history of migration from Eastern Europe to the Americas in the nearly hundred-year period from 1846 to 1940. During this time, some fifty-five million individuals made the trip to North, Central, and South America, many taking substantial risks and enduring physical and financial hardship, separation from families, and uncertainty in a new world. “With skillful analysis of events, vivid prose and countless tender, instructive stories, she presents lessons from the past which could help today’s leaders address the global population shifts of our time,” observed Bill Schwab, writing on the website e-Missourian.com.
Zahra derives significant information from documentary sources to tell the story of millions of emigrants. “Relying on letters, court documents and other archival sources, she tracks emigration not just across the Atlantic, but within Europe—and pays equal attention to the places left behind,” commented Julie M. Klein, reviewing the book in the Chicago Tribune. The author not only describes what happened to emigrants after they arrived at their destination, but also what happened to the villages, towns, families, and countries they left behind. “At the turn of the twentieth century, mass migration from Eastern Europe hollowed out whole villages, transforming the lives of those who stayed behind as well as those who left,” noted Times Higher Education contributor Hester Vaizey. In Poland and Hungary, the loss of a cheap labor pool caused difficulties, while family cohesion was endangered by the ease with which persons could leave to go elsewhere.
“The Great Departure masterfully presents the broad scope of emigration from Eastern Europe to the Americas,” Schwab stated. The book “is a rich and innovative study, almost over-stuffed with insights about race, gender and emigration policies,” noted Klein. Vaizey concluded that The Great Departure “offers a deep, multifaceted understanding of mass migration.” Throughout the book, Zahra “handles this immensely complicated and multidimensional history with remarkable clarity and feeling,” observed Foreign Affairs contributor Robert Legvold. A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that Zahra is a “graceful writer who has produced a very fine study,” and a Kirkus Reviews writer called Zahra’s book a “significant work of social history bound to please serious readers and scholars.”
In an interview with Adam Morgan in the Chicago Review of Books, Zahra explained her academic interest in migration. “As a historian I was drawn to migration because it remains such a hugely important issue in our own time around the world, and I wanted to understand the origins of those debates and conflicts. It is also a subject that brings together the stories of ordinary people with political history, and that links the history of East Central Europe with the history of Western Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world.”
Against the World
(open new2)Against the World presents the history of anti-globalism in the time around World War I. Zahra comparatively looks at social anxieties and economic pressures that existed then as well as in the current era. Starting with local- or national-level economic shocks, anti-globalist movements grew as both left- and right-wing political parties tapped into these sentiments and postwar Europe and the subsequent Great Depression left many people depraved of the basics of life.
Booklist contributor Brendan Driscoll observed that Zahra offers “a cautionary rebuke of historians who … announced a world that had moved beyond the nation-state.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor found Against the World to be “discouraging yet important, expertly rendered political history.” The same reviewer found Zahra’s telling of this history to be “excellent yet unnerving.”(close new2)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Historical Review, April 1, 2009, Keely Stauter-Halsted, review of Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948, p. 507.
Austrian History Yearbook, 2010, Laurence Cole, review of Kidnapped Souls, p. 263.
Booklist, December 1, 2022, Brendan Driscoll, review of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics between the World Wars, p. 95.
Canadian Journal of History, September 22, 2010, Nazan Maksudyan, review of Kidnapped Souls, p. 391.
Central European History, March 1, 2010, Maureen Healy, review of Kidnapped Souls, p. 188.
Chicago Tribune, March 17, 2016, Julia M. Klein, “Life & Style Books,” review of The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World.
Choice, November 1, 2008, P.W. Knoll, review of Kidnapped Souls, p. 581.
Economist, April 30, 2016, “Backwards and Forwards: Eastern Europe,” review of The Great Departure, p. 77.
Foreign Affairs, March 1, 2016, Robert Legvold, review of The Great Departure.
German Studies Review, May 1, 2009, Nancy M. Wingfield, review of Kidnapped Souls, pp. 420-22.
Journal of Modern History, December 1, 2009, Caitlin Murdock, review of Kidnapped Souls, p. 1001.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2016, review of The Great Departure; November 15, 2022, review of Against the World.
Library Journal, May 1, 2011, Frederic Krome, review of The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II, p. 93; March 1, 2016, Laure Unger, Skinner, review of The Great Departure, p. 113.
New Republic, June 20, 2011, Mark Mazower, “The Smallest Victims.”
Publishers Weekly, February 29, 2016, review of The Great Departure, p. 54.
Slavonic and East European Review, April 1, 2011, Mark Cornwall, review of Kidnapped Souls, pp. 365-67.
States News Service, September 17, 2014, Susie Allen and Jann Ingmire, “UChicago Historian Tara Zahra Named 2014 MacArthur Fellow.”
Tablet, June 28, 2011, Adam Kirsch, “Lost and Found.”
Times Higher Education, March 31, 2016, Hester Vaizey, review of The Great Departure.
Times Higher Education Supplement, May 5, 2011, Hester Vaizey, review of The Lost Children, pp. 52-53.
UWire Text, October 3, 2014, “Historian Officially a MacArthur ‘Genius,’” profile of Tara Zahra.
ONLINE
American Council of Learned Societies website, http://www.acls.org/ (July 27, 2011), author profile.
American Historical Association website, http://www.historians.org/ (January 29, 2014), “AHA Member Spotlight: Tara Zahra.”
Chicago Review of Books, http://www.chicagoreviewofbooks.com/ (April 7, 2016), Adam Morgan, “The Exodus of Eastern Europe: An Interview with Tara Zahra.”
e-Missourian.com, http://www.emissourian.com/ (April 20, 2016), Bill Schwab, review of The Great Departure.
History News Network, https://historynewsnetwork.org/ (August 12, 2018), Erik Moshe, “What I’m Reading: An Interview with Tara Zahra.”
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://www.h-net.org/ (February 21, 2012), Eagle Glassheim, review of Kidnapped Souls; Gary Cohen, review of Kidnapped Souls.
Irish Rover, http://wwww.irishrover.net/ (October 28, 2011), Ellen Roof, “Rising Historian Tara Zahra Wins Nanovic’s Prestigious Award.”
MacArthur Foundation website, http://www.macfound.org/ (January 25, 2017), author profile.
Swarthmore College Bulletin, http://media.swarthmore.edu/ (February 21, 2012), Susan Cousins Breen, “At the Heart of Honors.”
University of Chicago, Department of History website, http://history.uchicago.edu/ (January 27, 2023), author profile.
Homer J. Livingston Professor of East European History and the College
tzahra@uchicago.edu
Roman Family Director, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society
Affiliated Faculty, Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies
Faculty Board, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights
Member, Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies
PhD'05 University of Michigan
MAILING ADDRESS
The University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 E. 59th Street, Mailbox 85
Chicago, IL 60637
Social Science Research Building, room 213 – Office
(773) 834-2599 – Office telephone
(773) 702-7550 – Fax
CV
FIELD SPECIALTIES
Modern Europe; Central and Eastern Europe; Habsburg Monarchy and Successor States; transnational and comparative history; international history; gender, childhood and the family; nationalism; migration and displacement; humanitarianism and human rights
BIOGRAPHY
Tara Zahra's research focuses on the transnational history of modern Europe, migration, the family, nationalism, and humanitarianism. Her latest book, Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars will be published by W.W. Norton Press in 2023. With Pieter Judson, she is currently working on a history of the First World War in the Habsburg Empire. Zahra is also the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World (Norton, 2016) and, with Leora Auslander, Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Cornell, 2018). Her previous books include The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Harvard, 2011) and Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands (Cornell, 2008).
GRADUATE ADVISING
I welcome applications from graduate students interested in Central European history (including Habsburg, East European, and German history) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as European international history and transnational history. Some of my current and former PhD students have worked on the history of gender and sexuality in late Imperial Vienna; migration and the family in postwar West Germany; the body in late Socialist Czechoslovakia; Jewish culture in postwar Czechoslovakia and Poland, Roma in postwar Hungary; colonialism and empire in Poland and Germany; and masculinity and coal mining in Socialist Czechoslovakia.
BOOKS
Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars. New York: W.W. Norton, 2023.
Coauthored with Pieter Judson, The Great War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, in progress.
Coauthored with Leora Auslander. Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.
The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016.
Review by Benjamin Cunningham in the Los Angeles Review of Books (May 24, 2016)
Review by The Economist (April 30, 2016)
Interview with Adam Morgan for the Chicago Review of Books (April 7, 2016)
Review by Julie M. Klein in the Chicago Tribune (March 17, 2016)
The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
George Louis Beer Prize, American Historical Association, 2012
Radomir Luza Prize, Austrian Cultural Forum, 2012
Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008; paperback, 2011.
Book Prize, Czechoslovak Studies Association, 2009
Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 2009
Hans Rosenberg Book Prize, Conference Group for Central European History, 2009.
Book Prize, Austrian Cultural Forum, 2008-2009
Laura Shannon Prize, Nanovic Institute, 2008–2009
ARTICLES
“Migration, Mobility, and the Making of a Global Europe,” Contemporary European History 31 (February 2022), 142-54.
“Against the World: The Collapse of Empire and the Deglobalization of Interwar Austria,” Austrian History Yearbook 52 (2021)
“Fin d’empire et genre de la déglobalisation,” Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire 53, 2021.
"'Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge': Roma, Migration Panics, and Internment in the Habsburg Empire." American Historical Review 122, no. 3 (Jun. 2017).
"Europe's Shifting Borders." Foreign Affairs (Feb. 11, 2017).
"Travel Agents on Trial: Policing Mobility in Late Imperial Austria." Past & Present 223 (May 2014): 161–93.
"Forum: Habsburg History." German History 31 (Jun. 2013): 225–38.
With Pieter M. Judson. "Introduction." Austrian History Yearbook 43 (2012): 21–27.
[Papers from the May 2008 symposium, "Indiference to Nation in Habsburg Central Europe."]
"Going West." East European Politics and Societies 25 (Nov. 2011): 785–91.
"'The Psychological Marshall Plan': Displacement, Gender, and Human Rights after World War II." Central European History 44 (Mar. 2011): 37–62.
"Enfants et purification ethnique dans la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre." Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 66 (Apr.–Jun. 2011).
"'A Human Treasure': Europe's Displaced Children Between Nationalism and Internationalism." Postwar Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives 1945–1949 Past & Present Supplement 6 (2011): 210.
"Imagined Non-Communities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis." Slavic Review 69 (Spr. 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 (Mar. 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 (Dec. 2006): 1378–1402.
"Looking East: East Central European 'Borderlands' in German History and Historiography." History Compass 3, no. 1 (2005): 1–23.
"Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945." Central European History 37 (Dec. 2004): 499–541.
RECENT COURSES OFFERINGS
Undergraduate
Writing Family History (junior colloquium)
Human Rights in World Civilization
Twentieth-Century Europe
History of Human Rights (in Vienna)
East Central Europe in the Twentieth Century
Nazism (junior colloquium)
European Civilization I & II
Gender & Sexuality in World Civilization
Migration and Displacement in Twentieth-Century Europe
Graduate
History and Anthropology of the Present (with Susan Gal)
Seminar: Globalization and Its Discontents (with Jon Levy)
Transnational Europe: Twentieth Century
Nations & Empires (with Susan Gal)
Nationalism in East Central Europe
Unsettled Europe: Migration and Displacement in Modern Europe
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Europe (with Leora Auslander)
Historiography (with Emily Osborn)
Migration and Material Culture in Modern Europe (with Leora Auslander)
UNIVERSITY AND DEPARTMENTAL SERVICE
Roman Family Director, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society
Faculty Sponsor of Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe Workshop
Executive Board, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Center for Study of Gender and Sexuality
Editorial Board, Past & Present
NEWS
—Recieves Guggenheim Fellowship (2021)
—Delivers the Center for Austrian Studies' 36th Annual Kann Memorial Lecture (2020)
—"The Ugly U.S. History of Separating Famiies Goes Back Way Beyond Trump" in the Daily Beast
—Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
—Discusses "Europe's Shifting Borders" in Foreign Affairs
—Reviews of The Great Departure in the Chicago Tribune, the Economist, and the Los Angeles Review of Books
—Publishes The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (Norton, 2016)
2016_The_Great_Departure.jpg
—Writes an opinion piece, "America, the Not So Promised Land," for the New York Times
—Coorganizes "People & Things on the Move" conference, Neubauer Collegium
—Coorganizes "Human Trafficking, Labor Migration, and Migration Control in Comparative Historical Perspective" conference, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights
—Awarded 2014 MacArthur Fellowship
—Discusses "Humanitarianism and Displaced Children in Twentieth-Century Europe" [video, 66 minutes]
—Delivers lecture at Shannon Prize Award ceremony [video, 85 minutes]
Tara Zahra
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Tara Zahra
Born August 3, 1976 (age 46)
Nationality American
Academic background
Alma mater University of Michigan
Swarthmore College
Academic work
Discipline East European History
Institutions University of Chicago
Tara Elizabeth Zahra (born August 3, 1976) is an American academic who is a Livingston Professor of East European History at the University of Chicago.[1]
She graduated from Swarthmore College and from the University of Michigan with a PhD.[2] She has concentrated her studies on sociohistorical models and archival research on family, nation, and ethnicity in the twentieth century leading to an integrative approach across national borders.[3][4] A MacArthur Fellowship was awarded in 2014.[5][6][7][8][9] In 2017, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[10]
Contents
1 Other awards
2 Publications
3 References
4 External links
Other awards
2009 Czechoslovak Studies Association Prize
2009 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize
2009 Hans Rosenberg Book Prize
2011 Laura Shannon Prize, Kidnapped Souls
2012 Radomír Luža Prize
2012 George Louis Beer Prize, The Lost Children[11]
2014 MacArthur Fellowship
Publications
Zahra, Tara (2008). Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948. Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801446283. OCLC 164802970.
Zahra, Tara (2011). The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families After World War II. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674048249. OCLC 676725391.
Zahra, Tara (2016). Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0393078015. OCLC 909974344.
Zahra, Tara and Leora Auslander, eds. (2018), Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement. Cornell University Press, 2018. ISBN 9781501720093.
Zahra, Tara (2023). Against the world : anti-globalism and mass politics between the world wars. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-65196-6. OCLC 1320809289.
8/12/18
What I’m Reading: An Interview with Tara Zahra
Historians/History
tags: interview, Tara Zahra
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by Erik Moshe
Erik Moshe is an HNN Features Editor.
Tara Zahra is a professor of history at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on the transnational history of modern Europe, migration, the family, nationalism, and humanitarianism. She is currently working on two book projects: a history of deglobalization in interwar Europe and a history of the First World War in the Habsburg Empire, co-authored with Pieter Judson. Zahra is the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World (Norton, 2016) and Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Cornell, 2018), co-authored with Leora Auslander. Her previous books include The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Harvard, 2011) and Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands (Cornell, 2008).
What books are you reading now?
I am preparing to teach a graduate course on the history of globalization in the fall with my colleague Jon Levy, so I am preparing for that: Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists; Heidi Tinsman’s Buying into the Regime; and Adam Tooze’s Shock of the Global are among the books on the list.
I read a lot for pleasure when I have time. I am enjoying Caroline Fraser’s biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Prairie Fires). Recently I really liked Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, Meg Wolitzer’s Female Persuasion and Tom Rachmann’s The Italian Teacher. I am pregnant and have been grateful for Emily Oster’s Expecting Better, which is one of the most sensible pregnancy books I have found.
What is your favorite history book?
It is really difficult to name a favorite. I admire so many books and historians for different reasons. But a recent book I don’t get tired of rereading and teaching is Kate Brown’s Plutopia. It is politically significant, research-driven, and beautifully written –the kind of history I hope to write.
Why did you choose history as your career?
I have always been drawn to history at an imaginative level (I read a lot of historical fiction growing up). But I didn’t think of history as a potential career until my senior year at Swarthmore when I was taking a course on fascism with Pieter Judson (who now teaches at the European University Institute in Florence). That was when I realized I might be interested enough in history to keep at it for a long time. I think I was drawn to the unique way that history enables you to combine storytelling with political and social analysis. Before that I seriously considered becoming a dancer, a journalist, or going into public policy.
What qualities do you need to be a historian?
Good historians have many different qualities, but I think imagination and empathy, determination, and the capacity to work independently/alone help enormously.
Which historical time period do you find to be the most fascinating?
I keep returning to the period between 1900-1950. I suppose a lot happened during that period in European history…
Who was your favorite history teacher?
Not surprisingly, I have to say Pieter Judson, who got me into this field in the first place.
What are your hopes for world and social history as a discipline?
I’m interested in seeing the fields of world/global and social history come into closer conversation; more histories that look at the intersection or interaction of global forces with local and everyday life. Aside from migration history it sometimes seems hard to bring those scales of analysis together.
I believe that historical scholarship is almost always generated by and speaking to present-day concerns, but I also think that this is a particularly critical moment for historians to reflect on and intervene (where possible) in contemporary debates.
Do you own any rare history or collectible books? Do you collect artifacts related to history?
I am not really a collector. I do have a poster of a 1930s child welfare campaign of the Czech Provincial Commission for Child Welfare. Maybe as I get older some of the books and objects that I own will become collectible!
What have you found most rewarding and most frustrating about your career?
I feel extremely fortunate to have a job that I love, and to have had support that has enabled me to pursue the research that interests me, regardless of where it takes me. I really enjoy teaching and find it rewarding when I can see that students are discovering new ideas. And I find writing very rewarding as a creative process and outlet.
As someone who teaches graduate students, I find it frustrating that it is so hard for really talented teachers and scholars to find good jobs. I also find it frustrating to see how little progress history seems to have made as a field in terms of the inclusion and advancement of minorities and women, because I think it makes a difference in terms of the quality and kind of knowledge we produce. And I also worry about trends in higher education, particularly the shift toward more corporate models.
How has the study of history changed in the course of your career?
Not many people were thinking transnationally when I started graduate school in 1999; most people were still working in national silos. That has obviously changed enormously. The field of east European history has also shifted a lot, as we’ve moved solidly beyond Cold War frameworks.
What is your favorite history-related saying? Have you come up with your own?
This one stumped me. I don’t have a favorite saying or motto, but maybe I need one.
What are you doing next?
I’m working on a book about deglobalization in interwar Europe. It is obviously inspired in part by current events. I’m trying to think about the history of globalization as a non-teleological process, and also to understand the ways in which populist politics on the right and left in the 1920s and 30s were animated by anxieties about globalization, including migration, trade, and the loss of sovereignty.
I’m also writing a co-authored book with Pieter Judson about the Habsburg Empire during the First World War.
Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics between the World Wars. By Tara Zahra. Jan. 2023.400p. Norton, $35 (9780393651966). 320.54.
This history of anti-globalism before, during, and after WWI examines economic pressures and social anxieties that persist today. Beginning in response to the globalization of international trade and finance in the nineteenth century, the first anti-globalist movements were largely a response to economic shocks experienced locally or nationally. But the emergence of mass political parties, coupled with the deprivations of the war and the Great Depression, intensified anti-globalist sentiments across the political spectrum. Both right- and left-wing movements would leverage these grievances in pursuit of their own ends and in doing so remake the international sociopolitical order. Zahra, whose previous works examined mass migration, identifies Central Europe as a key geographic lens through which to observe the heady hubris of globalist thought and the carnage of its antithesis. She is also intrigued by Henry Ford, a complicated man who was famously "at the vanguard of the anti-global turn," yet "profited greatly from global trade and immigrant labor." Tacit within this illuminating account is a cautionary rebuke of historians who, prematurely and perhaps aspirationally, announced a world that had moved beyond the nation-state.--Brendan Driscoll
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Driscoll, Brendan. "Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics between the World Wars." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 7-8, 1 Dec. 2022, p. 95. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731042586/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4c4078ce. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.
Zahra, Tara AGAINST THE WORLD Norton (NonFiction None) $35.00 1, 24 ISBN: 978-0-393-65196-6
Historical analysis of the interwar period and "the legacy of anti-globalism," a history that holds relevance for today.
MacArthur fellow Zahra, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, begins by quoting 1920s pundits who mourned the golden age before 1914 when internationalism flourished and one traveled the world after simply buying a ticket. This may have been true for the (largely White) affluent class, but deep poverty and inequality affected the majority. The devastation of World War I produced worldwide demands for justice. Unfortunately, true justice was hard to come by, and readers will often squirm at Zahra's excellent yet unnerving history of an era when nationalism--always more powerful than ideology, economics, or brotherly love--exploded. Those who assume that mass murder began with Hitler will learn their error as Zahra recounts how the torrent of new European states created after the Treaty of Versailles proclaimed the superiority of the ruling ethnic group and expelled "foreigners." By 1926, this situation had created 9.5 million of "a new kind of migrant: the refugee." Though many historians don't portray Hitler and Mussolini as anti-globalists, they justified their wars as a means of acquiring resources from a world that they thought was depriving their citizens. Autarky, or national self-sufficiency, became a worldwide passion. Passports appeared; tariffs soared; and governments promoted cottage industries to replace foreign imports and a return to the land to allow the unemployed to feed themselves and the nation. Zahra points out that these sentiments slowed during World War II and the Cold War. Globalism became a buzzword in the 1990s, when "a certain kind of free-market capitalism and global integration appeared to be the unstoppable victors of history" after the collapse of communism. McDonald's had opened in Moscow, and the new World Wide Web was uniting the world. Then came the 21st century, when the bottom seemed to fall out, and supernationalists proclaimed that they had been right all along.
Discouraging yet important, expertly rendered political history.
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Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Zahra, Tara: AGAINST THE WORLD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A726309388/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2a4595e5. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023.