Coming to grips with the multivalent instrumentalization of the “Past” is a major historical problem for the study of the successor states of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. The emergence of these states began for some in the nineteenth century, but was completed only with the disruption of the First World War. The turbulent decades that ended with the Second World War present a condensed moment of aspiration that welded nation-building projects to social experimentation, political innovation, economic realignment, and cultural transformations. Unpacking the meaning of this moment of experimentation therefore has resonance not only for the understanding of this period, but also informs long term historical representations of these states and societies into the present.

While this course is not a conventional survey, it will offer thematic explorations of aspects of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other countries that will situate their development in a broader narrative. These thematic explorations will, in turn, open possibilities for analytical and historiographic analyses that will familiarize students with notions of legacies, empires, theories of nationalism, social transformation, revolution and rupture, continuity and tradition, cultural symbolism. Finally, the course will explore the formative but also entangled relationship of these regions with the rest of Europe, and will suggest an augmentation of the standard practice of Area Studies with a subaltern move to "provincialize Europe" from within.