New Books in Eastern European Studies

Mar 09 2025 1048 ep. 60 mins 2.3k
New Books in Eastern European Studies Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Eastern Europe about their New Books

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Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, "East Central Europe Since 1989" (Routledge, 2025)

Mar 09 2025 92 mins  
East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025) examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequality, and literature, highlighting the overt functions, latent functions, and side effects associated with each sphere. Communism in East Central Europe had cracks from the beginning, as uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 195

Stefan Cristian Ionescu, "Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Mar 05 2025 81 mins  
On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania explores the hopes, struggles and disappointments of Jewish communities in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to recupera

Tamizdat under Putin: A Discussion with Publisher Feliks Sandalov

Mar 05 2025 60 mins  
Russia has a long history of publishers operating from abroad, producing books and periodicals for a Russian-speaking audience. One notable example is The Bell (Kolokol), published by Alexander Herzen, the Russian writer and thinker who emigrated in the mid-19th century. The waves of Russian emigration in the 20th century—beginning with those fleeing the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

Robert C. Austin, "Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King" (Central European UP, 2024)

Mar 04 2025 63 mins  
Listen to this engaging podcast with historian Robert Austin, the author of Royal Fraud: The Story of Albania's First and Last King (Central European UP, 2024). In the book, Austin explains the rise and fall of Albania's first and only monarch, King Zog!. The road to becoming Europe's youngest president in 1925 and king of Albania in 1928 was paved with feuds and assassinations. Zo

László Borhi, "Survival under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes" (Central European UP, 2024)

Mar 03 2025 47 mins  
A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinis

Victoria Khiterer, "Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War, 1918-1920" (Edwin Mellen, 2015)

Mar 01 2025 83 mins  
Jewish Pogroms in Kiev During the Russian Civil War discusses how anti-Jewish violence began during the revolution and civil war 1917-1920 raising questions of responsibility of civil and military authorities and the antisemitic propaganda spread by official mass media as well as deliberate exploitation of antisemitism for political purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Christina Kiaer, "Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Feb 26 2025 108 mins  
Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (U Chicago Press, 2024) presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for col

Doina Anca Cretu, "Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Feb 26 2025 61 mins  
The decades following World War I were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania (Stanford UP, 2025) considers the role of foreign aid in Romania between 1918 and 1940, offering a new history of the interrelation between state building and nongovernmental humanitarianism and philanth

Shay A. Pilnik, "The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War" (Purdue UP, 2025)

Feb 22 2025 90 mins  
The Nazis and their collaborators buried over 100,000 victims at Babyn Yar, a ravine in modern-day Ukraine. Most of the individuals were Jewish, making this area one of the most infamous mass murder sites in history. The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War (Purdue UP, 2025) starts when the travesty ends, telling the story of the ravine’s

Noa Shashar, "The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648-1850" (Brandeis UP, 2024)

Feb 21 2025 42 mins  
In The Marital Knot: Agunot in the Ashkenazi Realm, 1648 - 1850 (Brandeis UP, 2024), Noa Shashar sheds light on Jewish family life in the early modern era and on the activity of rabbis whose Jewish legal rulings determined the fate of agunot, literally "chained women," who were often considered a marginal group. Who were these men and women? How did Jewish society deal with the dan