Past Seminar Fellow Events

Workshop: Religious Dialogue in the Early Modern World (Florence- 2023). A workshop organized by the EUI History Department together with the University of Minnesota - College of Liberal Arts.

The 2020–21 Seminar Fellows Program on tourism, sports, and politics in the 19th–21st centuries at the Center for Austrian Studies was a two-part event, with a keynote by Dr. Gundolf Graml (Agnes Scott College) held on October 30, 2020, and three seminar meetings throughout spring 2021. 

In his lecture, “Tourism and the 75th Anniversary of the Austrian Second Republic: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” Professor Graml explored how tourism shaped the formation of the Second Austrian Republic from 1945 to the present. Tourism’s prominent status in postwar Austria, Graml argued, can only partially be explained by the sector’s economic relevance. Tourism has impacted the political, social, and cultural narratives of postwar Austria in ways that reach far beyond the economy. The talk traced interdisciplinary perspectives on tourism developed in history, ethnography, literary studies, and cultural studies and engaged in close readings of selected postwar Austrian cultural texts and scenarios. Analyses of films such as Der Hofrat Geiger and 1. April 2000; of the 2009 historical exhibit, Linz – Kulturhauptstadt des Führers; and of the 21st-century Sound of Music revival in Salzburg laid the ground for further discussions of the role of tourism as a matrix for historical and cultural analyses. 

In spring 2021, the seminar meetings featured presentations on a range of topics, broadly dealing with tourism, sports, and politics. Presided over virtually by Dr. Igor Tchoukarine (University of Minnesota), the seminar, which met on March 31, April 23, and May 17, featured the work of seven Ph.D. students and postdoctoral and early career scholars from universities in the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Canada. In addition to Dr. Igor Tchoukarine, Dr. Gundolf Graml, Dr. Kevin James (University of Guelph), Dr. Jessica Pearson (Macalester College), and Dr. Sune Bechmann Pedersen (Lund University) served as facilitators throughout the program. The seminar’s theme was especially timely in a year of tremendous uncertainty and near-unprecedented limitations on international travel and tourism. 

Aimée Plukker (Cornell University) began the program with a presentation that examined West Berlin as a postwar tourist destination. Plukker’s paper provided an incisive commentary on narratives of postwar recovery and industry in West Berlin, situating these narratives within a broader economic and political context of the Cold War—with a specific interest in the Marshall Plan. Dr. Alexander Langer (University of Colorado) followed Plukker with a presentation on the Johnson Administration’s plan to address the so-called travel gap in an attempt to deal with the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit in the late 1960s. Langer’s presentation explored the administration’s See America First campaign, followed by the more aggressive, and ultimately failed, effort to impose a tax on international tourism in 1968. 

Josef Djordjevski (University of California, San Diego) began the second meeting with a presentation on the shortcomings of Yugoslav state management of the Adriatic coast in the 1980s. The presentation made a specific effort to highlight that managerial shortcomings were often the result of economic and financial pressures rather than a lack of political will or ambition on the part of Yugoslav governmental agencies. Dr. Felix Jeschke (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich) followed Djordjevski with a presentation focusing on the Eastern Adriatic tourism industry in the early 20th century. Jeschke’s paper investigated the use of pan-Slavic narratives in the tourism industry, focusing specifically on the Czech sea resorts of Baška (on the island of Krk) and Kupari (near Dubrovnik).

Dr. Stefanie Eisenhuth (Leibniz Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam) began the final meeting with a paper inspired by her Ph.D. dissertation on border crossings from West to East Germany. Eisenhuth’s paper examined travel regulations and the type of individuals who would have perhaps constituted the typical border crosser—families, Allied forces, businesspeople, and so on. Eisenhuth noted that many of these eastbound travelers, and the East German tourism industry in general, have been more or less forgotten in contemporary Germany. Eisenhuth’s presentation was followed by Jérémie Magnin’s (University of Neuchâtel) presentation on visitor and guest books at Rigi-Kulm, a resort hotel in the Swiss Alps, in the first half of the 19th century. These visitor and guest books included scientific and scenic observations, along with details about trips and descriptions of visitors’ stays. Magnin explained that these guest books, alongside Murray’s guidebook of Switzerland, impacted visitors’ perceptions, knowledge, and expectations of the Mount Rigi summit. To conclude the seminar, Abraham Seda (University of Minnesota) presented on boxing cultures in colonial Zimbabwe, focusing specifically on the use of indigenous medicine, namely mangoromera, as a subversive act. Seda’s presentation navigated the difficult waters of cultural imperialism, Indigenous resistance, and masculinity, making a fitting bookend to the seminar. 

In his conclusion of the seminar, Igor Tchoukarine praised the eclectic collection of papers presented through the course of the program and remarked that in this difficult time of distance from our traditional scholarly communities, the Seminar Fellows program became a space of collaboration and discussion. Finally, thanks to Kevin James’ initiative, a second iteration of this seminar is slated to take place at the University of Guelph in spring 2022.

Participants:

Jose Alonzo (University of Guelph, Canada)

Josef Djordjevski (University of California San Diego)

Stephanie Eisenhuth (Leibniz Center for Contemporary History, Germany)

Emma Hooghwinkel (Radboud University, the Netherlands)

Felix Jeschke (Ludwig Maximilian University, Germany)

Jérémie Magnin (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland/University of Guelph, Canada)

Alexander Langer (University of Colorado)

Aimée Plukker (Cornell University)

Abraham Seda (University of Minnesota)

Facilitators:

Sune Bechmann Pedersen (Associate Professor, Lund University)

Gundolf Graml (Professor, Agnes Scott College)

Kevin James (Professor, University of Guelph)

Jessica Pearson (Assistant Professor, Macalester College)

Igor Tchoukarine (Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota)

Workshop: October 25-27, 2019

Hosted by the Institute for Modern and

Contemporary Historical Research,

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Seminar Fellows

Anna Huemer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Salzburg. Her research interests include diplomatic history, Habsburg–Ottoman relations, cultural history, gender history, and the history of masculinity in the early modern period. She completed her MA at the University of Salzburg with a thesis entitled “Gifts for the Sultan, Characteristics of Diplomatic Gifts in Selected Habsburg Grand Embassies (17th Century). ” She also worked for a project supported by the Austrian Science Fund ("The Mediality of Diplomatic Communication") as a (digital) editor of a 17th-century travelogue. She holds a BA in Communication Studies and has worked at the Salzburg Museum. Her current doctoral research deals with diverse models of masculinities in the Austrian nobility in the 17th century. 

Rose Malloy is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at the University of Chicago. Her research is focused primarily on the First World War in Central Europe with attention to themes of nationalism, class, citizenship, migration, and border disputes. This proposal addresses the role of migrants and refugees in nation-making projects during and after the First World War with particular attention to the Slovene-speaking populations around the Austrian Littoral. 

Ambika Natarajan received her Ph.D. in the history of science from Oregon State University. Her dissertation, "Sex, Surveillance, and the Servant Question in Vienna, 1850-1914," is a study of servanthood in post-1850 Vienna that ranges from a discussion of medical history to an analysis of criminal cases, novels, poetry, early film, and images in the popular press. The dissertation examines the contradictory rhetoric of victimhood and criminality applied to maidservants at a pivotal moment for understanding how poor working-class women were shaped by their circumstances from the early modern period through the modern global age through mass migrations. Based upon her dissertation research, she is currently working on a book manuscript that demonstrates the continuity between the changes in gendered policing affected by labor migrations in nineteenth-century Habsburg Central Europe and those provoked by the present-day refugee crisis in the region. 

Anna Parker is an AHRC-funded Ph.D. student in History at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines the everyday 'social lives' of clothes in imperial Prague and aims to reveal how ordinary people attached meaning to and used clothing in a time of significant demographic and social change for the city. This project combines criminal court cases with surviving objects from Central European museums. At Cambridge, she co-organizes the 'Material Culture Forum,' an interdisciplinary and cross-period network that examines themes and challenges in material culture studies. 

Robyn Dora Radway is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Central European University specializing in Habsburg Central Europe and its imperial entanglements with the Ottoman world. She completed her Ph.D. in 2017 at Princeton University with a dissertation entitled "Vernacular Diplomacy in Central Europe: Statesmen and Soldiers Between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, 1543-1593." She also holds a BA and an MA in Art History and has worked in several museums. Her current book project combines her art historical training with her doctoral research to write a history of mixed media illustrated books in Habsburg-Ottoman exchanges. This project is supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. 

Jan Volek is a doctoral candidate in medieval history at the University of Minnesota. He holds an MTS in History of Christianity from Vanderbilt Divinity School and an MA in Medieval Studies from Western Michigan University. He is working on his dissertation, provisionally titled "Challenging the Reformation Paradigm: Religious Life in Central Europe, 1470-1530," which investigates the role of patronage in transformations of religious landscapes and devotional practices in urban communities in Bohemia and Moravia. In the fall, he will be the Richard Plaschka Pre-Doc fellow at the University of Vienna, where he will be conducting archival research for his dissertation and collaborating with scholars engaged in the European Research Project, Visions of Community. 

Christoph Würflinger is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Salzburg specializing in early modern Habsburg-Ottoman relations. He completed his MA in 2017 at the University of Salzburg with a thesis entitled "Symbolic Communication in Habsburg-Ottoman Conflict Management. The Grand Embassy of Anton Corfiz Count Ulfeld to Constantinople 1740/41". His Ph.D. project focuses on the mediality of diplomatic correspondence and analyzes the 'rules' according to which diplomats’ letters were written with the aim of identifying the main factors that shaped their content. The project is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). 

Faculty Organizers and Facilitators

Prof. John Deak is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame. He is a specialist in the Habsburg Empire (since the eighteenth century) and interwar Austria. He is broadly interested in political history and the rule of law. His first book, Forging a Multinational State: State-Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, 2015), was awarded the Karl-von-Vogelsang-Staatspreis für Geschichte der Gesellschaftswissenschaften in 2018. He has recently been working on a book-length project (with Jonathan Gumz) on the rule of law in the Habsburg Empire under the State of Emergency in the First World War. 

Prof. Howard Louthan is the Director of the Center for Austrian Studies and a professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of Central Europe with a special focus on religion. His books include The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna and Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation. 

Prof. Arno Strohmeyer studied history and ethnology at the University of Vienna and received his Ph.D. in 1992. He was visiting professor at the Department of History at the University of Vienna and was appointed Professor of Modern History at the University of Salzburg in 2007. He has been a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2013 and Director of Research and Deputy Director of the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History of the Academy since 2017. His research focuses on the early modern period and is mainly concerned with the history of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire. His research topics include peacekeeping and conflict management, systems of government and political participation, politics, religion, history of historiography, historical source editions, and diplomatic history.

Workshop: March 24, 2018

This workshop explores some of the strategies that medieval authorities, both religious and secular, used in projecting, exercising, and defending their legitimacy. Examples of art and architecture deployed in this endeavor will be considered, as well as other ways in which religious and political communities enforced their rules, resolved competing claims, and minimized conflict. The seminar brings together graduate students from several disciplines who are working on dissertations related to this general theme.

Seminar Fellows

Marcela Perett, North Dakota State University (Seminar Convener)

Marcela Perett is an Assistant Professor of Medieval History whose research interests include late medieval movements, specifically the Hussites in Bohemia and the Lollards in England and their vernacular writings. Her monograph on the Hussite vernacular writings, entitled "Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement" will be published later this year by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jonathan Lyon, University of Chicago (Seminar Convener)

Jonathan Lyon's research and teaching focus on the political and social history of Germany, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire in the medieval period, particularly the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. His first book, Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100–1250 (2013), won the John Nicholas Brown Prize for the best first book from the Medieval Academy of America. He has also published a volume of translated Latin sources entitled Noble Society: Five Lives from Twelfth-Century Germany (2017) and numerous articles. Currently, he is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

Peter Dobek, Western Michigan University

Peter Dobek is a PhD candidate at Western Michigan University where he is completing his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of James R. Palmitessa. His dissertation examines public houses—inns, taverns, ale-houses—during the Jagiellonian Dynasty (1385-1572) in the city of Cracow as important nodes of society, politics, economics, gender relations, and culture. The purpose of his dissertation is twofold: the first is to provide basic information on public houses in Cracow during the Jagiellonian Era and the second is to push research on these establishments in Europe.

Hannah Elmer, Columbia University

Hannah Elmar is a Ph.D. candidate in medieval and early modern history at Columbia University. Her dissertation, "Alive Enough: Reanimating the Dead in Central Europe, 1200-1545," examines the reanimation of dead people as a way of exposing the creative borrowings (and conflicts) between "religious" and "scientific" epistemologies, which could also produce new conceptions of life itself. Her supervisor is Joel Kaye.

Luke Fidler, University of Chicago

Luke Fidler is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, where his dissertation examines the relationship between art and ideology during the reign of Henry the Lion. His scholarly publications have appeared in Art Journal, Notes & Queries, and postmedieval, and he has contributed reviews to Anglia, The Georgia Review, The Journal of Ladakh Studies, and Peregrinations. In addition to his scholarly research on early- and high-medieval art, he regularly publishes criticism and teaches with the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project.

Amelia Kennedy, Yale University

Amelia Kennedy is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Yale University where she is writing her dissertation under the supervision of Anders Winroth. Her dissertation examines discipline, expulsion, and apostasy in Cistercian monasteries, c. 1100-1400. More specifically, this chapter draft discusses old age in a Cistercian context, exploring the particular challenges, responsibilities, and advantages of elderly monks.

Bryan Kozik, University of Florida

Bryan Kozik is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Florida, set to graduate in August 2018. His doctoral research has focused on religion, diplomacy, and politics in early modern Central Europe, with a particular emphasis on the impact of mobile agents of the Habsburg and Jagiellonian dynasties during the Reformations. His dissertation, "Building a Cosmopolitan Episcopacy in Reformation Poland," uses the career of famed humanist, diplomat, and bishop Johannes Dantiscus (1485-1548) to examine early efforts to counter evangelical reform transnationally across a broad Central Europe, with an epicenter in Royal Prussia. He conducted the majority of his research in Warsaw, Cracow, Gdansk, and Olsztyn courtesy of a Fulbright grant in 2015-2016.

Kevin Lord, Yale University

In his dissertation, Kevin Lord examines the role that custom and honor played in the last great medieval struggle between emperor and pope for supremacy in the Holy Roman Empire. More generally, he is interested in the religious and cultural history of Europe during the High and Late Middle Ages. Originally from Denver, Colorado, Kevin received his BA in History from the University of Colorado Denver and MA in History at the University of Colorado Boulder before matriculating at Yale University as a Ph.D. student.

Lisa Scott, University of Chicago

Scott is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation concerns the role of the regional assembly in the 15th-century Czech lands, focusing on the interactions of different political, religious, and status groups at these assemblies, and how the assemblies reveal these interactions within broader political developments. She conducted research for her dissertation with the support of a US Student IIE Fulbright Award in the Czech Republic during the 2014–2015 academic year.

Jan Volek, University of Minnesota

Jan Volek is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Minnesota. After completing his undergraduate studies at Lipscomb University, he earned an MTS from Vanderbilt University Divinity School, where he concentrated on the history of Christianity. He then received MA in Medieval Studies from the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University. In his work, Jan concentrates on the religious developments in Central Europe during the long fifteenth century with a particular focus on Bohemia. This broader interest led him to his dissertation project, tentatively entitled "Beyond the Reformation Paradigm: Religious life in Central Europe, 1470–1530," which investigates changes in urban religious landscapes on the Bohemian-Austrian border around the turn of the sixteenth century.

Workshop: November 30–December 2, 2017

This seminar brings together European and North American graduate students from several disciplines who are working on dissertations related to this general theme.

Seminar Fellows

Rita Krueger, Temple University (Seminar Convener)

Rita Krueger is a specialist in 18th-century Central European history. Her first book explored the early decades of Czech national sentiment among Bohemian elites and she has published other work on scientific institutions and the Bohemian Enlightenment. She is currently working on a biography of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, as well as two other research projects – on medical authority in the Habsburg lands and one on the politics of family life in the 18th-Century Austrian Empire. Professor Krueger regularly teaches Central European history, early modern and modern European history, and European gender history at Temple University.

Scott Berg, Western Governors University

Scott Berg wrote his dissertation on confessionalism and religious toleration in the Habsburg Empire from 1792-1867 and received his doctorate at Louisiana State University (LSU) in 2015. He performed his archival research from 2012 to 2014 in numerous archives in Vienna and Hungary and enjoyed visiting the old Habsburg lands across Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. He has published articles in Catholic Historical Review and Central European History. He currently works at Western Governors University and spends much of his spare time dealing with the irrational demands of his two toddlers.

Caleb Karges, Concordia University Irvine

Caleb Karges is currently an Assistant Professor of History and Political Thought at Concordia University Irvine. He received his BA in History from Concordia University Irvine in 2009 and began his postgraduate career with an MLitt in Modern History from the University of St Andrews in 2010. Caleb was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews in October 2015. His Ph.D. thesis, "So Perverse an Ally: Britain's Alliance with Austria during the War of the Spanish Succession, 1702-1713" received the International Commission of Military History’s “André Corvisier Prize" in 2017.

Claudia Kreklau, Emory University

Claudia Kreklau is a doctoral candidate in History at Emory University. Her research uses food, foodways, and food discourses as a lens for exploring the interplay of political and industrial changes with social and cultural developments in nineteenth-century Germany, focusing on “middle-class” identity formation. She asks how food, foodways, and food discourses functioned as tools for food workers (housewives, cooks, maids, etc.) and their employers/families in creating middling identities at economic, political, and cultural levels. Her narrative begins with German rural customs of the social middle in the last years of the Holy Roman Empire and ends with “modern” consumption habits of the urban, industrial bourgeoisie in the fin-de-siècle. After completing her degrees in History and Culture and the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick, UK, Claudia spent a semester at the Autonomous University of Madrid as a visiting student in the History of Science. She has been supported among others by the Wellcome Trust, London, the German Historical Institute, Washington, and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Tim Olin, Central College

Tim Olin is an Assistant Professor of History at Central College in Iowa. He was awarded his Ph.D. in history from Purdue in August 2015. Based on archival research in Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia, his dissertation, “Expanding Europe: German Borderland Colonization in the Banat of Temesvár, 1716-1847,” explored issues of migration, assimilation, and interethnic relations on the Habsburg frontier. The manuscript received a “Distinguished Dissertation Award” from Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts and the biennial “Dissertation Prize for 2016” from the Center for Austrian Studies. His article, “Cultivating an Orderly Society: Physical and Mental Landscapes on the Habsburg’s Southern Frontiers” was published in the Austrian History Yearbook in 2017. Most recently, his article, “’Flüchtlinge’ oder ‘Auswanderer’? Migration aus dem Osmanischen Reich in das Banat im 18. Jahrhundert” is scheduled to be published in a collected volume in Austria later this year. He earned his MA in history from Purdue and a BA and MA in German from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Before coming to Purdue, Tim was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan where he taught English and German.

Amy Onstot, University of Minnesota

Amy Onstot is a Ph.D. student in the field of Musicology at the University of Minnesota. She received her BA in saxophone performance from Waldorf College in Forest City Iowa and obtained her Master’s of Music from Western Illinois University. Her research interests include music and patronage, Italian Baroque music, music in Eighteenth-Century Austria, and coronations. She presented at the annual Convention of the Centers for Austrian Studies in Jerusalem in November 2016, in the international workshop “Musical culture/s of the Habsburg Monarchy and its successors' states between the 18th and 20th Century,” at the University for Performing Arts in Vienna in February 2017, and at the 2017 Conference of the Austrian Studies Association. She is currently working on her dissertation, Musical Patronage and the Portrayal of Monarchical Power at the Court of Maria Theresa 1740-1780.

Lucia Staiano-Daniels, University of California, Los Angeles

Lucia Staiano-Daniels was born on 24 November 1981, in Albuquerque New Mexico. She was fortunate to go to the best college in the United States, St. John’s College, known for its demanding Great Books program. She likes to say that although she did not know she would become an early modernist, being exposed to the classical works of Western thought at a young age ensured that she read the same things my subjects read. She then got a Master's in Eastern Classics from the same school and a Master's in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU, mostly for fun. After studying Latin and German, she entered UCLA’s History program, where her advisors are David Sabean and Geoffrey Symcox. With the latter and Joan Waugh, she has been one of the organizers of a military history study group at the university, which has met for several years now. She travels frequently to the United Kingdom, where she has been honored to work with Peter Wilson and David Parrott.

Greg Tomlinson, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Greg Tomlinson is a Ph.D. candidate in German history at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. The focus of his doctoral thesis is the intersection of land surveys and speculation, the rising political aspirations of Bavarian economic liberals, and the state efforts led by kings Max I Joseph and Ludwig I to restrict the activities of republican political actors. He conducted research at the Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv and Staatsarchiv in Munich.

Madalina Veres, Temple University

Madalina Veres is a Visiting Fellow at Temple University’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy. She is a historian of the Habsburg Monarchy in a global context and is interested in the history of science in the early-modern period with a focus on cartography. She is currently working on her book manuscript entitled “Foot Soldiers of Empire. Habsburg Cartographers in the Age of Enlightened Reform” based on her PhD dissertation defended at the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. Madalina’s work has appeared in journals, such as the Austrian History Yearbook and Itinerario, International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, and in collective volumes dedicated to the history of cartography.

Workshop: April 1-3, 2016

The 15th and 16th centuries in Europe witnessed a complex, large-scale sociocultural transformation that traditional historiography has characterized as the transition from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern era. Latin Christendom underwent a series of changes that led it from crisis through reform through confessionalization, while social and political organization developed from universalist claims of the medieval monarchy to early modern princely states and oligarchic republics. Although no one today would advocate any sharp line dividing the Middle Ages from modernity, social and religious change remains a phenomenon that calls for explanation. This seminar brings together European and North American graduate students from several disciplines who are working on dissertations related to this general theme.

2016 Seminar Fellows:

Vojtěch Bažant, Charles University in Prague: "Space of Holy Land and 15th Century Czech Travel Writings"

Bažant is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Czech History, Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. He also collaborates with the Centre for Medieval Studies in Prague. His thesis, “The Notions about the Beginning of Nations in 14th and 15th Century Historical Culture,” is devoted to the analysis of a late medieval historiography primarily in the Land of Bohemian Crown and in the Hungarian kingdom

Suzanna Ivanič, Cambridge University: "Confessional Identity and Material Culture on the Eve of Recatholicization in Prague (1600-1620)"

Ivanič is a Lecturer in Early Modern European History at the University of Kent. Her work focuses on early modern Central Europe and her research interests span religion, travel, and material and visual culture. Her doctoral dissertation on religious materiality in seventeenth-century Prague analyzed inventories and objects to reveal the beliefs, practices, and identities of Prague citizens during the Counter-Reformation. Recent and forthcoming publications include a chapter on religion in The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (2016): 322-37 and a co-edited book on early modern religious materialities with Amsterdam University Press.

Sara Ludin, University of California-Berkeley: "The Protestant Power of Attorney and the Construction of 'Religion' as a Legal Category"

Ludin is a Ph.D. candidate in Jurisprudence & Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation explores how the Protestant Reformation unfolded in civil law courtrooms in the German lands between 1520 and 1555—a time when confessional boundaries were in flux and no legal framework existed to manage the new theological divisions.

Doctrine in Reformation Studies"

Moldenhauer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at 
Northwestern University. His work focuses on the continuities and discontinuities between Luther 
and his late scholastic predecessors, especially on the doctrine of Christology. His 
dissertation uses Christology in the scholastic and reformation periods as a lens to explore the relationship between philosophy and theology, and to explore the transformation from medieval to early modern thought.

Amy Nelson, University of Notre Dame: " 'Multiple Options' for Christian Expression by Noble Women in Late Medieval Central Europe"

Nelson is a sixth-year Ph.D. Candidate at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She received a MMS from the same university in 2012, and a MTS from Harvard Divinity School in 2008. She received a Fulbright grant to pursue dissertation research in Austria during the 2014–2015 academic year. Amy’s current research is an aspect of her Ph.D. dissertation, “Cultivating Communities: The Society and Spirituality of Female Premonstratensians and their Patrons in Late Medieval Central Europe.”

Agnieszka Rec, Yale University: "Alchemical Exchange in Sixteenth-Century Central Europe"

Dr. Rec is a historian of the later Middle Ages and, beginning July 2017, the Assistant Editor at Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. Her research uses the alchemy practiced in Central Europe (roughly the territories of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) to explore questions in the history of the book and the history of science with a view to understanding the following of information across the continent. She received her Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 2016, with a dissertation titled “Transmutation in a Golden Age: Reading Alchemy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cracow.” Her research has been generously supported by FLAS, the Leiden University Library, the Fulbright Commission, and, most recently, the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA where she spent a fantastic 2016-2107 as the Herdegen Fellow in the History of Scientific Information.

Lisa Scott, University of Chicago: "The Renegotiation of the Estates at Bohemian Assemblies"

Scott is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation concerns the role of the regional assembly in the 15th-century Czech lands, focusing on the interactions of different political, religious, and status groups at these assemblies, and how the assemblies reveal these interactions within broader political developments. She conducted research for her dissertation with the support of a US Student IIE Fulbright Award in the Czech Republic during the 2014–2015 academic year.

Christina Traxler, University of Vienna: "Academic debates and diplomatic moves. The cooperation between the University of Vienna and the Duke of Austria in confining Hussitism in the Early 15th Century"

Traxler has been a university assistant at the Institute of Historical Theology, University of Vienna, since March 2015. Her doctoral dissertation is “Die Auseinandersetzung der Wiener Universität mit dem Hussitismus vom Konstanzer Konzil bis zum Beginn des Basler Konzils (1415 – ca. 1435)” (The University of Vienna facing Hussitism, 1415 – ca. 1435). It explores the efforts of the University of Vienna to fight Hussitism in the years between the Councils of Constance and Basel.

Věra Vejrychová, Charles University in Prague, and Paris-Sorbonne University

Vejrychová is a doctoral student at Charles University in Prague and Paris-Sorbonne University. Her PhD project is “La construction de la réalité historique chez le chroniqueur Jean Froissart” (The Construction of a Historical Reality in Jean Froissart’s Chronicles). She is analyzing Froissart’s chronicles of the Hundred Years War, dealing with the text as a product of rhetorical and ideological construction, while at the same time, addressing its connections to social and cultural realities.

Jan Volek, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Volek is a doctoral student at the history department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he works on the religious history of Central Europe in the late medieval and Early Modern periods. His dissertation project will consider the religious landscape and culture in several cities throughout the region at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. This project will pay particular attention to patronage rights over parish churches, and the role of clergy (regular and secular) in the urban community.

Faculty Seminar Leaders

Pavel Soukup

Pavel Soukup is a researcher at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic. He specializes in late medieval cultural and religious history, especially in Hussite and anti-Hussite texts. His latest book is Jan Hus: The Life and Death of a Preacher (German, ed. Stuttgart 2014, Czech ed. Prague 2015). His current research centers on the controversy over crusading indulgences in the fifteenth century.

Michael Van Dussen

Michael Van Dussen is an Associate Professor of Medieval English at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His monograph is From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge 2012). He has also recently edited The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge 2015). His current research center on the English encyclopedism and European communication networks in the fifteenth century.