RESEARCH INTERESTS
My teaching and research interests include the transnational history of Europe, the history of modern East-Central Europe, with a specialization in modern Hungarian history, and the history of nationalism, antisemitism, and religion in modern Europe.
My first book, In Defense of Christian Hungary, is a study of the ideology of Christian nationalism in Hungary during the interwar era. In it, I analyze the competition between secular and religious nationalists to define what the idea of “Christian Hungary” meant, how it should be realized, and whom it would include and exclude.
My second book, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, analyzes the history of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as a pan-European political idea from its origins to the present-day. In it, I trace the circulation of this myth across national boundaries and analyze how the political function of the myth was refashioned as anti-Communist politics in Europe changed over the course of the twentieth century. The book also explores the entanglement of the myth with contemporary Holocaust memory, as well as its survival after 1989 in the conspiratorial fantasies of the far right on both sides of the Atlantic.
COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT
Undergraduate
- 510:261 History of the Holocaust
- 506:299 History Workshop (topic: the Holocaust)
- 510:381 Eastern Europe, 1800-1948
- 563:368 Jews of Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1780-2010
- 510:102 Development of Europe, 1700-2000
Graduate
- 510:599 Readings in Modern European History
- 510:601 Colloquium on Religion and Secularization in Modern Europe
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- A Specter Haunting Europe. The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming November 2018)
- In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism in Hungary, 1890-1944 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
- “An Anti-Totalitarian Saint: The Canonization of Edith Stein,” Journal of the History of Ideas 79(3) (July 2018): 481-495.
- “European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?” Journal of Contemporary History 53(3) (July 2018): 622-643.
- with Ulf Brunnbauer, co-author, “Political Movements and Ideologies in Eastern Europe (18th Century to 1945) in, eds. The Routledge History of East Central Europe Since 1700, ed. by Árpád von Klimó and Irina Livizeanu (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2017), 323-365.
- “Christian Human Rights and the Jews,” The Immanent Frame, June 16, 2015
- “The Politics of Holocaust Memory in Hungary” in John-Paul Himka and Joanna Michlic, eds. Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013): 261-291.
- “Islam, Anti-Communism, and Christian Civilization: The Ottoman Menace in Interwar Hungary,” Austrian History Yearbook, Vol. 40 (2009): 114-124.
- “Transnational Culture War: Christianity, Nation, and the Judeo-Bolshevik Myth in Hungary, 1890-1920,” Journal of Modern History 80, no. 1 (March 2008): 55-80.
