2024 Rath Prize Winner and Honorable Mention Announced

The Center for Austrian Studies is pleased to announce that Mátyás Mervay is the 2024 winner of the Rath Prize for his Austrian History Yearbook article, "A Hungarian Old China hand and the End of Empire. Loyalty Struggles in Interwar Shanghai's Migrant Community."

From the Laudatio: Mátyás Mervay's innovative article brilliantly demonstrates the impact of the collapse of empire from a vantage point that is genuinely new, specifically that of a Hungarian in Shanghai. While there is an increasingly substantial body of work that sees Germans as historical actors in global contexts, historians of Austria-Hungary have been less inclined to focus on the empire's global features and to see the empire's denouement as a problem that extended far beyond Central Europe. Mervay's work demonstrates very clearly the features of an imperial population that was globally engaged, and by examining the end of empire through individuals abroad, he allows us to understand the processes of imperial collapse (and durability) in new ways. Using a biographical lens focused on Paul Komor, Mervay explores how the disintegrating Habsburg empire was experienced far beyond the confines of its European imperial borders. By aptly moving the scales of his analysis from the local to the global and vice-versa, he provides a complex, engaging, and conceptually rich narrative of Paul Komor's activities in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s. As a result, this article takes on the big narratives of empire, race, war, hierarchy, status, and ideology and is extraordinarily well tuned to how those big narratives intersect in small spaces. Mervay skillfully juxtaposes his biographical approach to Paul Komor with global considerations of empires, colonialism, trade, refugees, and migration, and in the process, the article defies traditional understanding of political allegiances, imperial legacies, and antisemitism. 

Mervay is a Visiting Lecturer and Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at New York University. He earned his Ph.D. in East Asian and Modern European History at New York University in 2024. He’s currently working on his first book, Postimperial Lives. Habsburg Expatriates and the Making of Sino-East-Central European Relations, 1918-1949, which explores the multifaceted connections between China and Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary through the biographies of a generation of Jewish and Gentile expatriates at the intersections of post-Habsburg loyalties. Fluent in Mandarin and other relevant languages afforded by his education in China and his native Hungary, Mátyás considers himself a global historian of China and Habsburg Central Europe. An educator and a public scholar, besides teaching modern East Asian history, he recently published a narrative non-fiction book on Shanghai’s Hungarian rescuer of World War Two Jewish refugees.

The prize committee also cited an Honorable Mention for Marsha Rozenblit's, "Jews and German Politics: The Case of Habsburg Moravia, 1867-1918." The committe stated: 

In her article, Marsha Rozenblit provides a master class in thorough, detailed socio-political history. Investigating the continued success of German liberalism in Moravia and the resistance within Moravian politics to the antisemitism endemic in other parties in the late empire, Rozenblit revises our narrative of how Jews and traditional German liberalism intersected at a moment of profound ideological shifts in the empire. By focusing on a region that often gets overlooked or elided into Bohemia, Rozenblit challenges accepted arguments about the fate of liberalism and the nature of German politics in the monarchy. Contrary to standard views that liberalism abandoned the Jews in an effort to stave off their electoral decline, Rozenblit's careful reconstruction, archivally rich, and clearly argued narrative demonstrates that in Moravia  -- a state with comparatively fewer German speakers -- Jews were an important part of what propped German liberalism up. The article profoundly enriches our understanding of the Jewish experience and political development in the decades before and after the turn of the century.

Rozenblit is the Harvey M. Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Maryland, where she has been on the faculty since 1978.  She is the author of two scholarly books: The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1918: Assimilation and Identity (SUNY Press, 1983) and Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (Oxford University Press, 2001).  She has also co-edited two books: Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (with Pieter Judson, Berghahn Books, 2005) and World War I and the Jews: Conflict and Transformation in Europe, the Middle East, and America (with Jonathan Karp, Berghahn Books, 2017), and she has written over 30 scholarly articles on such topics as Jewish religious reform in nineteenth century Vienna, Jewish courtship and marriage practices in 1920s Vienna, and German-Jewish schools in Moravia.  She served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies between 2009 and 2011.