2015 04/15 Tara Zahra

TARA ZAHRA

The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the “Free World,” 1889−1989

Tara Zahra is Professor of East European History, University of Chicago. She is the author of two award-winning books that in many ways defined current trends in East and Central European history. Her Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008) was selected as the best book in Contemporary European Studies and received Barbara Jelavich Book Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 2009, Austrian Cultural Forum Book Prize and other awards. Her The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) was recognized as the best book in European International History by the American Historical Association in 2012. In her books, Tara Zahra is challenging the way we view the development of the concepts of nation, family, and ethnicity and painting a more integrative picture of twentieth-century European history. She is the recipient of multiple research awards and fellowships, the most recent of which is The MacArthur Fellowship. This unrestricted fellowship is awarded to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. Professor's Zahra SEE NEXT talk is drawn from her current book project, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (forthcoming from W.W. Norton, New York).

Graduate student inquirer Tiffany Wilson

Summary

Beginning in the nineteenth century millions of East Europeans departed from home in search of work or in flight from war and persecution. How did this emigration affect the families and societies left behind? This talk explores how emigration became a powerful political tool in Eastern Europe, as successive governments sought to turn the flow of people on and off in order to reshape their populations and societies. Across the rise and fall of empires and nation-states, dictatorships and democracies, attempts to manage mass emigration gave rise to new forms of border control, ethnic cleansing, social protection, colonial ambitions, and humanitarian activism.