Pieter M. Judson
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of History, Swarthmore College

Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in History - Class of Spring 2011

Pieter M. Judson is an expert on the history of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, and Professor of History at Swarthmore College. In 2010 the Austrian Government awarded the Vogelsang State Prize to his book Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Harvard, 2006). The book also won prizes from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the Czechoslovak Studies Association. Judson’s other books include Exclusive Revolutionaries. Liberal Politics, Social Experience and National Identity in the Austrian Empire 1848-1914 (Michigan, 1996), winner of the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams prize; Wien Brennt! Die Revolution von 1848 und ihr liberales Erbe (BöhlauVerlag, 1998); a co-edited volume, Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (Berghahn Press, 2005); and The Habsburg Empire, published by Harvard in 2016. Currently editor of the Austrian History Yearbook, Judson is a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna, German Marshall Fund, and the Fulbright Program.

Project Description

Everyday Empire: A New History of Habsburg Central Europe, 1780–1948

Pieter Judson inaugurated the Academy’s Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellowship in Modern History. His project was to create a new narrative about the history of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states, one that integrates the history of this region into the history of Europe as a whole. In Everyday Empire: A New History of Habsburg Central Europe, 1780–1948, Judson rejects nation-based approaches and arguments about Eastern European exceptionalism. Instead, his history focuses on the ways that common social institutions, political structures, and cultural practices unified the peoples and regions of the Habsburg Monarchy far more than nationalism may have divided them.

Back To Top