The Department of History is pleased to invite you to its first Departmental Research Seminar of the 2023/24 Academic Year
Leslie Waters, Assistant Professor of History, University of Texas at El Paso, is presenting her book
Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands,
1938–1948 (University of Rochester Press, 2020)
Abstract:
Borders on the Move explores the ways in which border and regime changes affected societies at the local level in the Hungarian-Slovak borderlands in the World War II era. Examining the effects of redrawing the Czechoslovak-Hungarian border in 1938 and 1945, it shows how borderland residents lived transnational lives due to the multiple changes of sovereignty they experienced in the mid-twentieth century, including navigating multiple sets of national laws, bureaucracies, state languages, economic policies, and standards of political and national loyalty. From the perspective of state power, these territorial transformations prompted ethnic cleansing and wealth redistribution campaigns in order to consolidate control of the disputed territory. These actions transformed the borderland into a zone of exception, where rule of law was not always applied, and where regimes tested strategies of surveillance and violence before implementing them more widely.
Bio:
Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at El Paso and Managing Editor of Hungarian Studies Review. She received her PhD in History from UCLA in 2012. Her work focuses on the ways in which border and regime changes affect societies and her book, Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderland was published in 2020 by University of Rochester Press. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Association, Mellon Foundation, and the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research. Her second book project, Barcelona ’92: The New Europe at the Olympic Games, looks at border and regime changes in Central and Eastern Europe in a different era and from a different scope. It analyzes the role of the 1992 Summer Olympics in integrating post-communist Eastern Europe into liberal international politics and the global capitalist economy.
The Zoom link will be sent upon request. Please contact Margaretha Boockmann: BoockmannM@ceu.edu