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About Hugo Lane

NBN Episodes hosted by Hugo:

Eastern European Studies May 1, 2018

Jewish Poland Revisited

Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places

Erica Lehrer

Hosted by Hugo Lane
Sometime in the very early 1990s, while I was in grad school, I got a call from a student at Grinnell College, where I myself had graduated asking me about …
Eastern European Studies October 18, 2017

The Habsburg Empire

A New History

Pieter Judson

Hosted by Hugo Lane
Pieter Judson established himself as one of the top scholars of the East Central Europe with his first two books Exclusive Revolutionaries (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Guardians of …
Eastern European Studies July 5, 2017

Mapping Europe's Borderlands

Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire

Steven Seegel

Hosted by Hugo Lane
Since the publication of this book five years ago, Steven Seegel has become a leading authority on map-making in the Russian Empire with particular expertise on the western borderlands.Mapping Europe's …
Eastern European Studies September 26, 2015

Student Politics in Communist Poland

Generations of Consent and Dissent

Tom Junes

Hosted by Hugo Lane
In the conventional narratives of Communist Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally, student activism tends to get short shrift. While the role of students in 1956 is unavoidable and widely …
Eastern European Studies February 15, 2013

Moscow Believes in Tears

Russians and their Movies

Louis Menashe

Hosted by Hugo Lane
Did you see one of Eisenstein's masterpieces "The Battleship Potemkin" and "Alexander Nevsky" in a Russian or Soviet history class? Were you captivated by Tarkovsky's brooding long shots in movies …
Eastern European Studies January 11, 2013

The Ukrainian West

Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv

William Risch

Hosted by Hugo Lane
During the Cold War few Westerners gave much thought to Western Ukraine, and its main city, Lviv. It was what happened in Moscow and St. Petersburg that really mattered, and …
Eastern European Studies June 15, 2012

Guardians of the Nation

Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria

Pieter Judson

Hosted by Hugo Lane
What if much of what we think we know about nationalism and the spread of the national identity over the course of the nineteenth century were wrong? This view is …
Eastern European Studies June 15, 2012

Choosing Slovakia

Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism

Alexander Maxwell

Hosted by Hugo Lane
On 1 January 1993 Slovakia became an independent nation. According to conventional Slovak nationalist history that event was the culmination of a roughly thousand year struggle. Alexander Maxwell argues quite …
Eastern European Studies May 15, 2012

Dacha Idylls

Living Organically in Russia's Countryside

Melissa Caldwell

Hosted by Hugo Lane
Russians' dachas are regularly mentioned in a sentence or two in newspaper articles about life in Russia, and many of who have visited the lands of the former Soviet Union …
Eastern European Studies May 15, 2012

The Hidden Europe

What Eastern Europeans can Teach Us

Francis Tapon

Hosted by Hugo Lane
Most of the specialists in Eastern Europe I know first got truly interested in the region after a trip, which then triggered applications to grad school, years spent reading books …
Eastern European Studies March 11, 2012

Pleasures in Socialism

Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc

David Crowley and Susan Reid

Hosted by Hugo Lane
We all know socialism failed in Eastern Europe and that failure reflected two great shortcomings: a lack of democracy and an economic system that consistently fell short in providing its …
Eastern European Studies February 23, 2012

The Orient Within

Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria

Mary Neuburger

Hosted by Hugo Lane
Eastern Europe has never had the draw for scholars or tourists of France, Italy, Germany, or Great Britain, and within eastern Europe Bulgaria has invariably been overshadowed by Poland and …
Eastern European Studies February 23, 2012

Becoming Metropolitan

Urban Selfhood and the Making of Modern Cracow

Nathaniel Wood

Hosted by Hugo Lane
When I began my graduate history, virtually all my fellow apprentice historians of eastern Europe were captivated by nationalism and focused their research accordingly. Of particular interest was how people …
Eastern European Studies November 9, 2011

The Walls Came Tumbling Down

Collapse and Rebirth in Eastern Europe (Second Edition)

Gale Stokes

Hosted by Hugo Lane
Europe may currently be in crisis and riven with divisions, but at least it's a Europe of independent states. It was not always so. The Soviets dominated Eastern Europe for …
Eastern European Studies October 25, 2011

Bloodlands

Europe between Hitler and Stalin

Timothy Snyder

Hosted by Hugo Lane
Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as a far away land we know little about. He could have said it about any of the countries of east-central Europe. Yet, for the Soviet …