Tara Zahra

Assistant Professor of East European History
PhD University of Michigan 2005

FIELD SPECIALTIES

Modern Europe; Eastern and Central Europe;
Transnational and Comparative History; Nationalism; Childhood, Gender, and the Family; War and Occupation; Borderlands; Displacement and 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 new project on international political, pedagogical, and psychological activism around displaced and refugee children in Europe between 1918-1951. I am also finishing a comparative study of national classification in Alsace-Lorraine and the Bohemian Lands in the aftermath of World War I.

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PUBLICATIONS

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

"Lost Children: Displaced Children and the Rehabilitation of Europe," Journal of Modern History 80 (forthcoming, March 2009).

"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 (December 2006).

“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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