Tara Zahra
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of East European History, University of Chicago, Illinois

Berthold Leibinger Fellow - Class of Fall 2013

Tara Zahra, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, is interested in comparative approaches to modern European history, with a particular focus on migration and displacement, nationalism, gender and the family, international humanitarianism, and human rights. While her research concentrates on Eastern and Central Europe, she also looks to Germany, France, and the United States as she integrates Eastern Europe into broader histories of Europe and the world. Zahra holds degrees from Swarthmore College (BA, 1998) and the University of Michigan (PhD, 2005), and has received fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Harvard Society of Fellows.

 
Zahra’s first book, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Cornell, 2008), received several awards, including the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European History and the Hans Rosenberg Prize. Her second book, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Harvard, 2011), was awarded the 2012 George Louis Beer Prize in European International History by the American Historical Association, and the Radomir Luza Prize of the Austrian Cultural Forum.

 

In 2014, Zahra received a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Project Description

Exodus from the East: Emigration and the Making of the “Free World,” 1889-1989

In her Academy project, Exodus from the East: Emigration and the Making of the “Free World,” under contract with W.W. Norton, Zahra traces emigration from East Central Europe in the period 1889 to 1989, interrogating how emigration shaped ideals of freedom, new forms of social protection, and border controls in both East and West. After the Second World War, the “captivity” of East Europeans stood as symbol of Communist oppression. But Zahra argues that the link between freedom and mobility was contested long before Communists closed the Iron Curtain. Well before 1914, in fact, Austrian officials began a campaign to curtail emigration, insisting that East Europeans would emigrate to a new kind of slavery. Security and social solidarity instead of mobility comprised an alternate vision of freedom. At a time when US slavery and East European serfdom were living memories, the debate about emigration questioned the meaning of free labor and the location of the “free world.” Based on research in Austrian, Czech, Polish, French, and German archives, Zahra’s study brings a new perspective to the history of European migration, suggesting that East European concerns about emigration, as much as Western xenophobia and restriction, propelled the fortification of twentieth-century borders.

Back To Top