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PODCAST

New Books in Eastern European Studies

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox:

society & culture

All Episodes

57:35

Marta Dyczok, "Ukraine Calling: A Kaleidoscope from...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/07/09

Marta Dyczok's book Ukraine Calling: A Kaleidoscope from Hromadske Radio 2016-2019 (Ibidem Press, 2021) is like a time capsule containing a selection of interviews that aired on Hromadske Radio's Ukraine Calling show. They capture what people were thinking during a critical time in the country's history, from the July 2016 NATO Summit through to Volodymyr Zelenskyy's 2019 landslide election victories. Decision makers, opinion makers, and other interesting people commented on events of the day as

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62:46

Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel, "Ashkenazi Herbalism:...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/07/09

Until now, the herbal traditions of the Ashkenazi people have remained unexplored and shrouded in mystery. Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews (North Atlantic Books, 2021) rediscovers the forgotten legacy of the Jewish medicinal plant healers who thrived in Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, from their beginnings in the Middle Ages through the modern era. Including the first materia medica of 26 plants and herbs essential to Ashkenazi folk

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59:07

Kristin Poling, "Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/07/08

In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany's many growing cities. Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community,

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61:52

Ayse Parla, "Precarious Hope: Migration and the...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/07/07

There are more than 700,000 Bulgaristanlı migrants residing in Turkey. Immigrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically Turkish, they assume certain privileges because of these ethnic ties, yet access to citizenship remains dependent on the whims of those in power. Through vivid accounts of encounters with the police and state bureaucracy, of nostalgic memories of home and aspirations for a more secure life in Turkey, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (Stanford UP, 2019)

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81:02

Rossen Djagalov, "From Internationalism to...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/07/06

Would there have been a Third World without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. Although most histories of these geopolitical blocs and their constituent societies and cultures are written in reference to the West, the interdependence of the Second and Third Worlds is evident not only from a common nomenclature but also from their near-simultaneous disappearance around 1990. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third

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58:09

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, "Imaging and Mapping...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/07/06

Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to Post-Communist Bloc (Routledge, 2021) puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe's east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of travellers'

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57:47

Stephen V. Bittner, "Whites and Reds: A History of...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/07/01

Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar (Oxford UP, 2021) tells the story of Russia's encounter with viniculture and winemaking. Rooted in the early-seventeenth century, embraced by Peter the Great, and then magnified many times over by the annexation of the indigenous wine economies and cultures of Georgia, Crimea, and Moldova in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, viniculture and winemaking became an important indicator of Russia's place at the

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52:39

Mariusz Kalczewiak, "Polacos in Argentina: Polish...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/25

In Polacos in Argentina: Polish Jews, Interwar Migration, and the Emergence of Transatlantic Jewish Culture (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Dr. Mariusz Kałczewiak, senior research associate and lecturer in the Eastern European studies department at the University of Potsdam, recreates a mosaic of entanglements that Jewish migration wove between Poland and Argentina. Kałczewiak sheds light on marginalised aspects of Jewish migration and enriches the dialogue between Latin American Jewish studies

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65:06

Alessandro Testa, "Rituality and Social (Dis)Order:...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/25

Rituality and Social (Dis)Order: The Historical Anthropology of Popular Carnival in Europe (Routledge, 2020) is the first comparative historical anthropology of popular European Carnival in the English language, with a focus on its symbolic, religious, and political dimensions and transformations throughout the centuries. It builds on a variety of theories of social change and social structures, questioning existing assumptions about what folklore is and how cultural gaps and differences take shape

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81:23

Juliane Fürst, "Flowers Through Concrete:...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/24

Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the first chronological history of Soviet hippies, tracing their beginnings in the 1960s through the movement’s maturity and ritualization in the 1970s. It is also a rich analysis of key aspects of Soviet hippiedom, including ideology, kaif, materiality, and madness - both enacted and imposed. Flowers Through Concrete uncovers, in particular, the lost history of women who participated in the Soviet hippie

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76:10

Sean McMeekin, "Stalin's War: A New History of World...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/23

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on

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59:11

Chad Bryant, "Prague: Belonging in the Modern City"...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/23

What does it mean to belong somewhere? For many of Prague's inhabitants, belonging has been linked to the nation, embodied in the capital city. Grandiose medieval buildings and monuments to national heroes boast of a glorious, shared history. Past governments, democratic and Communist, layered the city with architecture that melded politics and nationhood. Not all inhabitants, however, felt included in these efforts to nurture national belonging. Socialists, dissidents, Jews, Germans, and

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80:52

Veronika Pehe, "Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/21

Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. Veronika Pehe's Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular

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57:39

Theodora K. Dragostinova, "The Cold War from the...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/18

During this anxious decade, Bulgaria's communist leadership invested heavily in cultural diplomacy to bolster its legitimacy at home and promote its agendas abroad. Bulgarians traveled the world to open museum exhibitions, show films, perform music, and showcase the cultural heritage and future aspirations of their ancient yet modern country. As Dragostinova shows, these encounters transcended the Cold War's bloc mentality: Bulgaria's relations with Greece and Austria warmed, émigrés once considered

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65:25

Stephen M. Norris, "Museums of Communism: New Memory...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/18

How did communities come to terms with the collapse of communism? In order to guide the wider narrative, many former communist countries constructed museums dedicated to chronicling their experiences. Museums of Communism: New Memory Sites in Central and Eastern Europe (Indiana UP, 2020) explores the complicated intersection of history, commemoration, and victimization made evident in these museums constructed after 1991. While contributors from a diverse range of fields explore various museums and

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55:32

Talking Ethnographic Fiction with Alexandros Plasatis

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/10

What does ethnography look like when presented as fiction? In this episode, we talk with Alexandros Plasatis, author of the new book Made by Sea and Wood, in Darkness (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021) a linked book of short stories based on the lives of Egyptian immigrant fishermen and other marginalized residents of a Greek town. Alexandros describes the fieldwork he conducted as a waiter in his family’s all-night café with a diverse clientele before explaining how and why he transitioned from studying

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72:47

Edward B. Westermann, "Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/10

The title of Edward Westermann's new book, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Cornell University Press, published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021), suggests that it is about the use of alcohol by perpetrators of the Holocaust. And it is. Westermann documents extensively how alcohol served to bind perpetrators together and to help them celebrate, conduct and perhaps forget mass murder. The amount of alcohol consumed as part of the German

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58:59

Jelena Đureinović, "The Politics of Memory of the...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/07

Exploring the concepts of collaboration, resistance, and postwar retribution and focusing on the Chetnik movement, Jelena Đureinović's book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia (Routledge, 2020) analyses the politics of memory. Since the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, memory politics in Serbia has undergone drastic changes in the way in which the Second World War and its aftermath is understood and interpreted. The glorification and romanticisation of the

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38:34

Christopher Ocker, "Luther, Conflict, and...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/04

Martin Luther - monk, priest, intellectual, or revolutionary - has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. Most studies of Luther stress his personality, his ideas, and his ambitions as a church reformer. In Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (Cambridge UP, 2018), Christopher Ocker brings a new perspective to this topic, arguing that the different ways people thought about Luther mattered far more than who he really was. Providing an

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61:47

Suzanne L. Marchand, "Porcelain: A History from the...

New Books in Eastern European Studies ·

2021/06/04

Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Rather than a history of art or aesthetics per se—though it certainly touches style and artists— Porcelain is at once a business history of mercantile productions, a history of chemistry at the dawn of modern industry, and a history of aristocratic consumption of porcelain as these stories open into an economic

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1,126 results

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