New Books in Eastern European Studies

New Books in Eastern European Studies

Interviews with Scholars of Eastern Europe about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Episodes

Emília Barna, "Working in Music on the Semi-Periphery: Local Cultural Production and Global Capitalism" (CEU Press, 2025)

October 3, 2025 • 45 mins
In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Emília Barna to discuss her new book, Working in Music on the Semiperiphery: Local Cultural Production and Global Capitalism (CEU Press, 2025). We talked about the changes and continuities that the Hungarian music industry underwent from the communist to the post-communist era, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on Barna’s research, and the gendered aspects of the musi...
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Branka Bogdan, "The New Yugoslav Woman: Reproductive Regulation in Socialist Yugoslavia" (Indiana UP, 2025)

September 30, 2025 • 50 mins
From 1945 to 1989, the Yugoslav state connected its claims of progressive politics and gender equality to its support of free healthcare, sex education and contraception, and laws that supported reproductive choice. Yugoslav men and women internalized these messages, proclaiming their homeland's superior care for its citizens in comparison to postwar Europe and the United States. Even as Yugoslav women faced stigma and abuse for th...
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Paris Papamichos Chronakis, "The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule" (Stanford UP, 2024)

September 25, 2025 • 71 mins
The Business of Transition: Jewish and Greek Merchants of Salonica from Ottoman to Greek Rule (Stanford UP, 2024) examines how the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Eastern Mediterranean navigated the transition from empire to nation-state in the early twentieth century. In this social and cultural history, Paris Papamichos Chronakis shows how the Jewish and Greek merchants of Salonica (present-day Thessaloniki) skillfully managed th...
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Tanja Petrovic, "Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army" (Duke UP, 2024)

September 21, 2025 • 43 mins
The compulsory service for young men in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) created bonds across ethnic, religious, and social lines. These bonds persisted even after the horrific violence of the 1990s, in which many of these men found themselves on opposite sides of the front lines. In Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People's Army (Duke UP, 2024), Tanja Petrović draws on memories and material effects of do...
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Bradley A. Gorski, "Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market After Socialism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

September 19, 2025 • 61 mins
Bradley Gorski, a literary and culture scholar, examines the breakneck commercialization of Russian book publishing and of Russian literature more broadly – in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, thousands of new publishers emerged, up from a mere two hundred at the Soviet Union’s end. The notion of the “bestseller” quickly came to dominate the new market, fueling he rise of immensely popular genres su...
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Dani Belo, "Russian Warfare in the 21st Century" (Routledge, 2025)

September 17, 2025 • 63 mins
Dani Belo's Russian Warfare in the 21st Century: An Incentive-Opportunity Intervention Model (Routledge, 2025) provides a comprehensive analysis of Russia's foreign policy in gray zone conflicts, with a particular focus on its interventions in Ukraine. Challenging conventional views, the book contends that Russia's use of varied gray zone tactics is influenced by both system-level incentives and domestic-level opportunities, which...
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Alex R. Tipei, "Unintended Nations: How French Liberals' Empire of Civilization Remade Southeast Europe and the Post-Napoleonic World" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025)

September 15, 2025 • 61 mins
In the wake of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, French liberals set out to create an informal empire. Their efforts to cultivate unequal partnerships with Christian, Greek-speaking elites in southeast Europe shaped national identities and structured global civilizational hierarchies over the decades that followed. Unintended Nations: France’s Empire of Civilization, Southeast Europe, and the Post-Napoleonic World (McGill-Queen's Univers...
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Huseyn Aliyev, "Who Fights for Governments? Paramilitary Mobilization in Ukraine and Beyond" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025)

September 13, 2025 • 107 mins
Exploring why, when and under which circumstances individuals decide to take up arms mobilizing for pro-government militias, Huseyn Aliyev's Who Fights for Governments? Paramilitary Mobilization in Ukraine and Beyond (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) draws on insights from long-standing ethnographic fieldwork among former and active members of Ukraine's pro-government volunteer battalions, and an original database of militias' obituaries...
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Vera Michlin-Shapir, "Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era" (Cornell UP, 2021)

September 12, 2025 • 54 mins
Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era (Cornell UP, 2021) offers a new framework for understanding Russian national identity by focusing on the impact of globalization on its formation, something which has been largely overlooked. This approach sheds new light on the Russian case, revealing a dynamic Russian identity that is developing along the lines of other countries exposed to globalization. Ve...
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Chelsi West Ohueri, "Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife" (Cornell UP, 2025)

September 11, 2025 • 51 mins
Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 2025) is the first book to interrogate race and racial logics in Albania. Chelsi West Ohueri examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. She argues that while race is often limited to Western processes of modernity that exclude Eastern Europe, racialization ...
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Thomas Graham, "Getting Russia Right" (Polity Press, 2023)

September 10, 2025 • 59 mins
“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia,” Winston Churchill once said. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That saying sounds as true now as ever in the midst of Russia’s war in Ukraine. In Getting Russia Right (Polity Press, 2023), however, Thomas Graham provides an expert perspective on Russian history and statecraft and offers timely keys to Russian national interests which can help the United States...
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Jovana Diković, "The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia" (UCL Press, 2025)

September 10, 2025 • 55 mins
What if rural progress isn’t about government intervention but about the self-reliance and ingenuity of peasants themselves?  The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia (UCL Press, 2025) subverts conventional wisdom on rural development by shifting the focus from state-led planning to the agency of peasants themselves. Rejecting the notion that rural populations are passive victims of top-down policies...
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Cynthia Paces, "Prague: The Heart of Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025)

September 8, 2025 • 100 mins
Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025) traces Prague's origins in the ninth century through the end of the Cold War. Highlights include the golden ages of Charles IV and Rudolph II; the religious conflicts of the Hussite and Thirty Years Wars; the rich culture of Europe's largest Jewish community; the rivalry between the city's German and Czech speakers; the World Wars and Nazi occupation; and the Communist era...
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Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley, "Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland's Illiberal Revolution" (Stanford UP, 2025)

September 8, 2025 • 39 mins
In Poland between 2015 and 2023, Jarosław Kaczyński and his Law and Justice Party (PiS) attempted a novel experiment. Could a governing party sustain a coalition committed religiously inspired social conservatism, old-school left-wing welfarism, and antipathy to Moscow and Brussels while also unravelling democratic institutions? It was, write Stanley Bill and Ben Stanley in Good Change: The Rise and Fall of Poland’s Illiberal Revo...
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Tia Sahrakorpi on a Use-Based History of Electricity in Finland

September 1, 2025 • 80 mins
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Tiia Sahrakorpi, Visiting Professor at Weber State University, about her interesting book project, Our Land: An Oral History of Energy, which was funded by the Research Council of Finland. The project, which was rooted in oral histories in three locations in Finland, takes a use-based perspective and examines how ordinary Finnish people adopted and used electricity. Learn more about you...
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Elizabeth White, "A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

August 29, 2025 • 76 mins
A Modern History of Russian Childhood: From the Late Imperial Period to the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Bloomsbury, 2020) examines the changes and continuities in ideas about Russian childhood from the 18th to the 21st century. It looks at how children were thought about and treated in Russian and Soviet culture, as well as how the radical social, political and economic changes across the period affected children. It explains how...
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Thane Gustafson, "Perfect Storm: Russia's Failed Economic Opening, the Hurricane of War and Sanctions, and the Uncertain Future" (Oxford UP, 2025)

August 29, 2025 • 62 mins
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 brought a tragic close to a thirty-year period of history that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reopening of Russia to the West after six decades of Soviet isolation. The opening lasted for three tumultuous decades and ended with a new closing, driven by the Ukrainian war, the imposition of Western sanctions, and the Russian responses to them. In Perfect Storm: Russia's Faile...
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Stanislav Kulchytsky, "The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor" (CIUS Press, 2018) - A Conversation with Bohdan Klid

August 27, 2025 • 68 mins
The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor (CIUS Press, 2018) is a distillation of thirty years of study of the topic by one of Ukraine’s leading historians. In this account, Stanislav Kulchytsky ably incorporates a vast array of sources and literature that have become available in the past three decades into a highly readable narrative, explaining the motives, circumstances and course of this terrible crime ag...
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Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov, "The Russian Revolution and Its Global Impact: A Short History with Documents" (Hackett Publishing, 2017)

August 26, 2025 • 63 mins
"On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jonathan Daly and Leonid Trofimov have reinvigorated the study of a turning point in world history. Instead of rehashing the internal dynamics of the Bolshevik takeover, the authors have carefully juxtaposed the international ambitions of the Bolsheviks with the Revolution's reception around the world. Daly and Trofimov pair their lucid introductory essay with documents from Soviet offic...
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Nicholas Birman Trickett, "Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia" (Hurst, 2025)

August 25, 2025 • 42 mins
Empire of Austerity: Russia and the Breaking of Eurasia (Hurst, 2025) traces how Russian economic policy precipitated the country’s slide towards an increasingly coercive authoritarianism, a hubristic challenge to the West, and all-out war with Ukraine. Decades of dependence on commodity exports, failure to invest and failure to consume enough have condemned not only the Russian Federation, but Eurasia more broadly, to stagnation a...
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