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Interview with Pieter Judson--May 15, 2017
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Abstract
Interview with Pieter Judson, Professor of 19th and 20th-Century History and Head of the History Department at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. The interview was conducted in Florence on May 15, 2017. Pieter completed his BA at Swarthmore and his PhD at Columbia. He began teaching at Pitzer College from 1988-1992, and then returned to Swarthmore as a professor from 1993 to 2014, where from 2011 to 2014 he was Isaac H. Clothier Professor of History and International Relations. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, among them Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, and a number of distinguished prizes for his books, as well as for his teaching. His books include: Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848-1914 (published by Michigan in 1996), and which won two prizes; Guardians of the Nation. Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, published by Harvard in 2006, which won three prizes; and The Habsburg Empire, A New History, published in 2016 by Harvard. In addition to his stellar scholarly reputation, Judson is also famous as a teacher and mentor to many in the field and beyond. Special thanks to Máté Rigó for preparing an inventory of the interview.
Description
Interview Themes
01:00 Introduction
02:00 First contact with East-Central Europe; early interest in history; the Netherlands; Smith College;
03:30 Road trip from Amsterdam to Istanbul in 1970, Vienna, Budapest, Transylvania, Bucharest, Bulgaria, Istanbul
06:30 Interest in maps, geography, history, politics
08:00 J.F. Kennedy, 1964 presidential campaign, East Germany, Hungary and first political memories
09:00 Eastern Europe, border crossings
10:00 Willy Brandt election
10:30 Swarthmore College, the 1970s
12:00 North Hampton, MA; parents professors at Smith College
12:30 “Hard time” to be a college student in the mid-1970s; discouragement of political action
the Quaker traditions
14:30 Inspiration to study German; Exchange student at the University of Munich, 1976-1977
16:30 Helmuth Schmitt’s reelection campaign;
17:00 Attraction to politics
17:20 Fascination by the role of ideology in 1970s German politics vs pragmatic US politics
18:00 1972, Mc+++ campaign, junior youth delegate
19:00 The disappointment with the lack of political change in the 1970s
20:00 Nineteenth-century politics
21:00 AIDS crisis ignored by politicians
21:40 War in Bosnia
24:00 Second book and arguments against nationalist politics
26:00 Cultures of nationalism and liberal politics
28:00 Reading nationalist sources against the grain
29:00 National indifference
30:30 Habsburg administration as umpire among political parties
33:00 Divergent views on nationalism in historiography (i) nationalism is not always problematic (ii) “not everyone is national”
36:00 Nationalism radically different in 1830s, 1870s, 1930s
36:30 Timothy Snyder on nationalism, Prometheanism
38:00 Interwar period as validating the idea of nation-state
38:30 The Reconstruction of Nations
39:30 The disappearance of empires as primary target of nationalist mobilization
40:00 Nation and empire are not mutually exclusive and mutually produce each other
42:00 Italy and Hungary as exceptions where the Habsburg empire emerges as major opposition
45:00 Changes in the historical profession; Cold War generation of historians tried to explain why Eastern Europe was a problem in terms of imperial exploitation; consensus on backwardness
47:00 The expansion of East European studies, generation of historians coming of age around 1989
49:00 Katherine Verdery
50:00 Graduate studies at Columbia University, István Deák, Eugene Weber, Robert Paxton
51:00 Research on Habsburg Monarchy, learning of Czech
53:00 Morals and historians, Jan Gross, Norman Naimark, Timothy Snyder, István Deák
55:00 Identity politics in academia
57:00 1990s and the return of nationalism
59:00 Moral statements and judgements by historians
1:00:00 Identity politics, 1970s, 2000s as an era of possibilities, Obama presidency, financial crisis
1:02:00 Habsburg Empire – A New History and its current context; Habsburg Empire and the EU?
1:03:00 The military dictatorship during WWI in the Monarchy
1:06:00 Graduate training at the EUI; the mission of the EU and how Europeans
are oblivious of it
1:09:00 The iron curtain the “wall” in Berlin
1:11:00 Different generations of historians of East-Central Europe
1:14:00 The Cambridge history of the Habsburg Empire project, 23 historians from multiple states, Mark Cornwall
1:15:00 Caitlin Murdoch
1:16:00 Teaching methodology, passion for history and narratives
1:21:00 Teaching at Swarthmore
1:24:00 The value of a liberal arts education
1:27:00 New research on East-Central Europe, regional studies
1:30:00 CEU as critical for the study of East-Central Europe
Date Issued
2017-09Subject
Habsburg Empire; EUI; national indifference
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Type
interview sound
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