This collective work analyzes the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, providing a coherent picture of Ukraine and Eastern Europe in the period 2013–2020. Giving voice to different social groups, scholarly communities and agencies relevant to Ukraine’s recent history, The War in Ukraine's Donbas goes beyond simplistic media interpretations that limit the analysis to Vladimir Putin and Russian aims to annex Ukraine. Instead, the authors identify the deeper roots linked to the autonomy and history of Donbas as a region. The contributions explore local society and traditions and the alienation from Ukraine caused by the events of Euromaidan, which saw the removal of the Donetsk-based president Viktor Yanukovych. Other chapters address the refugee crisis, the Minsk Accords in 2014 and the impact of the new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his efforts to bring the war to an end by negotiations among Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany.

The book concludes with four proposals for a durable peace in Donbas: territorial power-sharing; the conversion of rebels into legitimate political parties; amnesty for all participants of the armed conflict; and a transitional period of several years until political institutions are fully re-established.

The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was marked by a set of crises and conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. The editors, in naming this region as "Middle Europe" seek to revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position, situated between Big Powers and two World Wars.

The ten case studies in this book combine traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big-Power rivalry to understand the interwar period. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies, while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of client networks.

The authors, however, want to avoid the simplistic view that the Big Powers fully dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was indeed hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big-Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.

The memoirs of the Polish-Jewish writer, physician, and humanitarian aid activist, Alina Margolis-Edelman (1922–2008), present the life of its author from her childhood in .ód., Poland till the end of the World War II. Soon after the beginning of the war her father was shot by the Gestapo, and her mother moved to Warsaw Ghetto with Alina and her younger brother. Alina enrolled in the Jewish School of Nursing and worked as a nurse and a courier for the Resistance movement. In a rescue action she describes in the book, she saved the life of Marek Edelman – one of the leaders of the Ghetto Uprising (1943), and he later became her husband.
The stories told in her book illuminate issues of anti-Semitism, Holocaust, and Jewish resistance to oppression. She writes about solidarity in times of great danger, resilience in dire situations, dignity of love and care.

Analyzes the processes of nation-building in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century south-eastern Europe. A product of transnational comparative teamwork, this collection represents a coordinated interpretation based on ten varied academic cultures and traditions.

The book addresses contemporary developments in European identity politics as part of a larger historical trajectory of a common European identity based on the idea of 'solidarity.' The authors explain the special sense in which Europeans perceive their obligations to their less fortunate compatriots, to the new East European members, and to the world at large. An understanding of this notion of 'solidarity' is critical to understanding the specific European commitment to social justice and equality. The specificity of this term helps to distinguish between what the Germans call "social state" from the Anglo-Saxon, and particularly American, political and social system focused on capitalism and economic liberalism. This collection is the result of the work of an extremely distinguished group of scholars and politicians, invited by the previous President of the European Union, Romano Prodi, to reflect on some of the most important subjects affecting the future of Europe.

Where Currents Meet, Tanya Zaharchenko’s path-breaking study of literature and cultural memory, moves decisively beyond the simplistic view of a post-Soviet Ukraine divided between east and west. It positions the Ukrainian and Russian components of cultural experience in the country’s east as elements of a complex continuum. Combining insights from memory studies and border studies, Zaharchenko analyzes a generation of younger riters in the city of Kharkiv—a “doubletake generation” that came of age at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse and now revisits this experience through fiction. In the works of Serhiy Zhadan, Andreĭ Krasniashchikh, Yuri Tsaplin, Oleh Kotsarev, and others the author reveals how borderlands and frontiers, both geographical and conceptual, acquire zonal qualities of their own as these writers navigate the historical legacy they have inherited.

This study analyzes the impact of the Czechoslovak crisis of 1968–1969 on the two major communist parties in the West: the Italian and French ones. Discusses the central strategic and ideological tensions which these parties needed to deal with: domestic belonging versus allegiance to the world communist movement, doctrinal orthodoxy in a context of rapid societal changes, and the question of revolution and reform. These key problems were situated in different contexts: the crisis in the "world communist movement" after 1956 and the Sino-Soviet rift, socio-economic modernization and political radicalization in Western Europe, and the shift from Cold War to early détente on the European continent. The research for this work is based on the study of a large collection of recently released primary sources, particularly, the internal records of various communist parties in Europe.

In this title, a well-known academic economist and former finance minister gives a lucid and well balanced overview of the current financial turbulences that have hit the developed economies. Strongly criticizing the excesses of neoliberal capitalism, Daianu calls for implementing necessary regulatory reforms in the financial sector and for restoration of a proper balance between the functions of the state and the market. Daianu goes back to some of the roots of the current crisis and the flaws or weaknesses of the global financial system. In doing so, he extensively discusses the monetary union of the Euro, and the critical question whether, how and when additional countries can and should join the club. This is a timely volume with a very strong and important warning.

Because of his political views, Kazys Boruta spent years in prison both before and after WWII. In the last phase of his life in Soviet Lithuania, he earned a living by translations published under a pseudonym. Most of Whitehorn’s Windmill (Baltaragio malunas) was written in 1942, during the German occupation. Bearing a lyrical style that gives full rein to the oral folktale tradition Lithuania is famous for, the novel is by turns romantic, farcical, fantastic, and tragic. The sense of spirituality that permeates the work reflects Lithuania’s pagan roots that were overlaid with an occasionally over-zealous Catholicism not so very long ago. The story is about Whitehorn the miller’s efforts to find a match for his beautiful daughter, Jurga, against various calamities with and among suitors, neighbors, priests and other inhabitants of the village, and ultimately against the devil’s spell. The interesting plot made the novel popular as juvenile literature, too.

This third, concluding volume of the series publishes 14 studies and the transcription of a round-table discussion on Carlo Ginzburg's Ecstasies. The themes of the previous two volumes, Communicating with the Spirits, and Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology, are further expanded here both as regards their interdisciplinary approach and the wide range of regional comparisons. While the emphasis of the second volume was on current popular belief and folklore as seen in the context of the historical sources on demonology, this volume approaches its subject from the point of view of historical anthropology. The greatest recent advances of witchcraft research occurred recently in two fields: (1) deciphering the variety of myths and the complexity of historical processes which lead to the formation of the witches' Sabbath, (2) the micro-historical analysis of the social, religious, legal and cultural milieu where witchcraft accusations and persecutions developed. These two themes are completed by some further insights into the folklore of the concerned regions which still carries the traces of the traumatic historical memories of witchcraft persecutions.

This is a history of a stateless people, the Carpatho-Rusyns, and their historic homeland, Carpathian Rus’, located in the heart of central Europe. A little over 100,000 Carpatho-Rusyns are registered in official censuses but their population is estimated at around 1,000,000, the greater part in Ukraine and Slovakia. The majority of the diaspora—nearly 600,000—lives in the US.

At the present, when it is fashionable to speak of nationalities as “imagined communities” created by intellectuals or elites who may live in the historic homeland, Carpatho-Rusyns provide an ideal example of a people made—or some would say still being made—before our very eyes. The book traces the evolution of Carpathian Rus’ from earliest prehistoric times to the present, and the complex manner in which a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn people, since the mid-nineteenth century, came into being, disappeared, and then re-appeared in the wake of the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of communist rule in central and eastern Europe.

To help guide the reader further there are 34 detailed maps plus an annotated discussion of relevant books, chapters, and journal articles.

Who still remembers Tito’s Yugoslav Partisans? Once worshipped by some, now disparaged by others (or even by the very same), they remain largely unknown to the English-speaking public. This book enables readers to discover them through a meticulous reconstruction of their everyday life in the liberated territories. How did the Partisans stop interethnic violence? How did they foster the political participation of young people and women? What was the role of the Communist Party? What were the principles of the economy in the liberated territories? What were the Partisans’ views on justice, revenge and forgiveness? These are just some of the questions the author seeks to answer. The book also goes further, however, showing what makes up a resistance or revolutionary movement in the extreme conditions of war—where everyone must prove themselves, or perish.

Women and Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges expands the existing scholarship on women and the Holocaust adopting current approaches to gender studies and focusing on the texts and context from Central-Eastern Europe. The authors complicate earlier approaches by considering the intersections of gender, region, nationa, and sexuality, often within specifically delineated national settings, including the Czech/German, Hungarian, Hungarian/Austrian, Lithuanian, Polish/Israeli, Romanian/US-American, and Slovak. In these essays, the communist regimes after WWII often provide a productive framework for studying women and the Holocaust. This truly international volume features contributions by eminent authors, including pioneers in the field, as well as upcoming literary scholars and historians who delve into previously unmapped archives, explore cinematic representations and digital testimonies. 

The volume offers a comparative and transnational exploration of women's work in the twentieth century, concentrating especially on the turbulent periods after both World Wars and the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. The spatial focus of the analysis is the northeastern Adriatic region, which includes the border areas of Italy and Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia. The study is one of the results of an international research project carried out with the support of the European Research Council.

The seven studies in the book represent a cross-section of specific professional groups of women. The spectrum ranges from female teachers, clerks, tobacco and textile workers to intellectual, artistic or entrepreneurial activities of women. Although “gender” is a central category of analysis in the book, the aspect of representativeness was also observed in relation to other social factors such as race, class, generations, educational and religious background, etc. The main question of the study was the extent to which new state affiliations, geopolitical boundaries, and the establishment of new political regimes affected the women's labor market in the three postwar constellations.

Women in Poland 1945–1989: Modernity, Equality, Communism offers a compelling and deeply researched exploration of women’s lives under state socialism in Poland. The book reveals how communist promises of emancipation intersected with everyday reality – shaping work, family life, political participation, and personal identity. It examines women’s political engagement, experiences of work in both urban factories and rural fields, the management of household and family life, childhood and education, as well as biopolitics and the evolving culture of beauty. Juxtaposing the Polish experience with developments across Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, this insightful study uncovers the ambitions, contradictions, and lived realities of communist projects directed at women.

In August 1916, the Kingdom of Romania (Wallachia and Moldova) entered the First World War, leading in 1918 to a union with Transylvania and Bessarabia. Alin Ciupalã’s book considers the contribution of women to the achievement of the Romanian national project, including the role of bourgeois and middle-class women, the position of women in rural areas, and love, sex, and eroticism in wartime. He presents portraits of female figures, including Queen Marie, who organized field hospitals, supported civilians, promoted Romania abroad, and visited soldiers, and Ecaterina Teodoroiu, Romania’s only female officer, who died leading troops in battle.
Beyond women’s contribution to the war, the book also examines the effects of the First World War on gender roles in Romania. Feminist leaders expected that a wartime “training service” would entitle women to a life with full rights as citizens. Yet after the war, the situation returned to “normal,” and women largely continued to be excluded from the public sphere.

Can women succeed? Is women's work appreciated equally to men's? Do women's salaries reflect the quality and quantity of work they do? Does gender make a difference? These questions, which often emerge even in democratic societies and free-market economies, are much more acute in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Gender has been an issue thus far neglected in transition economies. Drawing on official statistics, an international multidisciplinary team of sociologists, economists, demographers and geographers examines how women have been affected by the labor market reforms in Poland in the transition period of the 1990s. The issues discussed include occupational segregation, the social mobility of women, demographic change, the power and participation of women in public life, women's organizations, and labor market reform.

Based on interviews with seventy women refugees, Women, Violence and War is a book about war as it is seen, lived and interpreted by women who were citizens of the former Yugoslavia.

Many of the accounts portray the horrific experiences the victims had to face and the book addresses issues of sexual, physical and psychological violence, as well as problems of confinement, upheaval and family separation. In a completely new insight the book dispels the myth that many of the women were peasants, and shows that in fact they were educated, middle-class women with independent careers. The study also depicts how some of the victims attempt to come to terms with the aftermath of wartime abuse.

This probing, accurate and unique investigation of victimization is an unparalleled volume that presents a completely new perspective maintaining that violence against women in war is not independent of peace-time victimization and the imbalance of power between sexes.

The thirteen critical and well-documented chapters of Women, Work and Activism examine women’s labor struggle from late nineteenth-century Portuguese mutual societies to Yugoslav peasant women’s work in the 1930s, and from the Catalan labor movement under the Franco dictatorship to workplace democracy in the United States. The authors portray women's labor activism in a wide variety of contexts. This includes spontaneous resistance to masculinist trade unionism, the feminist engagement of women workers, the activism of communist wives of workers, and female long-distance migration, among others. The chapters address the gendered involvement of working people in multiple and often precarious and unstable labor relations and in unpaid labor, as well as the role of the state and other institutions in shaping the history of women’s labor.

The book is an innovative contribution to both the new labor history and feminist history. It fully integrates the conceptual advances made by gender historians in the study of labor activism, driving home critiques of Eurocentric historiographies of labor to Europe while simultaneously contributing to an inclusive history of women’s labor-related activism wherever to be found. Examining women’s activism in male-dominated movements and institutions, and in women’s networks and organizations, the authors make a case for a new direction in gender history.

Using the foundational framework of political representation first introduced by Pitkin’s seminal book The Concept of Representation, this work explores the progress made within women’s political representation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). After the region’s history and collective present are explored, later chapters discuss three countries, Serbia, Poland and Moldova, in greater depth. The work argues that despite the many durable challenges that women face in CEE, women politicians and activists continue to advocate for progress and, in some cases, succeed in passing meaningful reforms. But the fate of this progress remains tenuous, given the many pervasive and enduring challenges that exist in the region, including a rise in authoritarianism and accompanying right-wing populism. The book also situates the CEE region in a global context, recognizing that the impediments CEE women in politics face are shared by women in politics around the world, suggesting a difficult path ahead.

With forty-two extensively annotated maps, this atlas offers novel insights into the history and mechanics of how Central Europe’s languages have been made, unmade, and deployed for political action. The innovative combination of linguistics, history, and cartography makes a wealth of hard-to-reach knowledge readily available to both specialist and general readers. It combines information on languages, dialects, alphabets, religions, mass violence, or migrations over an extended period of time.

The story first focuses on Central Europe’s dialect continua, the emergence of states, and the spread of writing technology from the tenth century onward. Most maps concentrate on the last two centuries. The main storyline opens with the emergence of the Western European concept of the nation, in accord with which the ethnolinguistic nation-states of Italy and Germany were founded. In the Central European view, a “proper” nation is none other than the speech community of a single language. The Atlas aspires to help users make the intellectual leap of perceiving languages as products of human history and part of culture. Like states, nations, universities, towns, associations, art, beauty, religions, injustice, or atheism—languages are artefacts invented and shaped by individuals and their groups.

While music as labor feeds into the capitalist cultural industries, this book proves that in this sector informality greatly permeates and governs power relations and the allocations of resources. The significant level of informal involvement of the household in the creative and reproductive processes is also explored. It is particularly in the semiperipheral context that the relationship between home-based work and paid work is unbalanced: Emília Barna's field data are from Hungary and range from 2018 to 2021. The same context also implies considerable involvement of the state and its subsidies, as well as the important role of gatekeepers’ political capital.

This book embraces the widest possible range of workers in the music industry. It deals with all music genres from high-flying to commercial and observes various workers in the production chain beyond musicians. Niche segments of the sector, such as YouTube-based commercial hip hop, are given special treatment. Using a variety of empirical research methods, the study examines the trends as workers are pushed towards digital entrepreneurship and platform work, on the one hand, and live performance, on the other. The focus on domestic work and informality offers a feminist analysis of work in music. This approach sheds light on gendered divisions of labor and forms of (self-)exploitation that usually remain invisible. The book proposes a new model of cultural autonomy that takes account of the semiperipheral relationship of music industry workers and institutions to both the market and the state.

Only one out of ten early modern Europeans lived in cities. Yet cities were crucial nodes, joining together producers and consumers, rulers and ruled, and believers in diverse faiths and futures. They also generated an enormous amount of writing, much of which focused on civic life itself. But despite its obvious importance, historians have paid surprisingly little attention to urban discourse; its forms, themes, emphases and silences all invite further study. This book explores three dimensions of early modern citizens’ writing about their cities: the diverse social backgrounds of the men and women who contributed to urban discourse; their notions of what made for a beautiful city; and their use of dialogue as a literary vehicle particularly apt for expressing city life and culture. Amelang concludes that early modern urban discourse increasingly moves from oral discussion to take the form of writing. And while the dominant tone of those who wrote about cities continued to be one of celebration and glorification, over time a more detached and less judgmental mode developed. More and more they came to see their fundamental task as presenting a description that was objective.

What do we mean by Europe? Thirty-three renowned authors from 33 European countries attempt an answer-in serious, ironic, skeptical, or optimistic tones. Their essays, written for the symposium held at the Literaturhaus Hamburg in 2003, reflect the astonishing diversity of European cultures. Not only are the style and experience of the individual authors remarkable for their distinctiveness, but their perspectives and views also appear to have little in common-at first glance.

The editors have created a unique literary project, a milestone in the vitally necessary cultural discourse about Europe.

Writing on Water grasps the phenomenon of sound in prayer, that is, a meaning in sounds and soundscapes, and a musical essence in the act of praying.

The impetus for the book arose from the author’s fieldwork among traditional Jews during the era of communism in Budapest and Prague. In that period the Jewish religion and Jewishness in general were supressed and rituals became semi-secret and turned inward. The book is a witness to these communities and their rituals, but it goes beyond documentation. The uniqueness of the sounds of the rituals compelled the author to try to comprehend how melodies and soundscapes became the sustaining/protective environment, as well as the vehicle, for the expression of a world-orientation—in a situation where open discourse was inconceivable.

The book is based on extensive interviews, musical recordings, photographs and scholarly analyses. It is unique in its choice of communities, its wealth of original documents, and its novel interpretation of sound.

Writing on Water is creative non-fiction. The presentation is evocative and poetic, but at the same time it transmits knowledge. The book can aid research and serve in courses in philosophy, religion, music, ethnomusicology, anthropology, aesthetics, Jewish studies, folklore, oral history, and performance studies. It is also a work of art and literature.

Written Here, Published There offers a new perspective on the role of underground literature in the Cold War and challenges us to recognize gaps in the Iron Curtain. The book identifies a transnational undertaking that reinforced détente, dialogue, and cultural transfer, and thus counterbalanced the persistent belief in Europe's irreversible division.

It analyzes a cultural practice that attracted extensive attention during the Cold War but has largely been ignored in recent scholarship: tamizdat, or the unauthorized migration of underground literature across the Iron Curtain. Through this cultural practice, I offer a new reading of Cold War Europe's history. Investigating the transfer of underground literature from the 'Other Europe' to Western Europe, the United States, and back illuminates the intertwined fabrics of Cold War literary cultures. Perceiving tamizdat as both a literary and a social phenomenon, the book focuses on how individuals participated in this border-crossing activity and used secretive channels to guarantee the free flow of literature.