Regional Fields
European History
Europe has played a large role in world history. It is the birthplace
of ancient city and modern nation states; of Roman Catholic, Eastern
Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity; of representative democracy
and the rule of law; of multinational and global empires; of industrialization,
the scientific revolution, and Enlightenment; of liberal democracy,
several types of nationalism, socialism, and fascism. It has also
been the site of some of the most destructive political behavior
in world history and of the events that resulted in World Wars I
and II. Following these and an ongoing attempt at union, the internal
geopolitics of Europe continue to exhibit drama and dynamism. Within
a rapidly evolving global economy and society, so do Europe’s
relations with the rest of the world. In all of its richness and
complexity, European history is not over.
European Faculty at the University of Pittsburgh bridge the premodern,
early modern, and modern periods. Among early Europeanists the predominant
interest is Western Europe. Several of the modernists specialize
in Central and Eastern Europe. Areas of strength include Romania
and Russia, Central Europe and Italy, France, and, especially, the
British Isles. The department pays particular attention not only
to internal European connections and comparisons but to changing
boundaries and evolving relationships with the rest of the world.
We study many of the ways in which Europeans have organized and
attempted to understand themselves, focusing upon legal, political,
and religious ideas; perceptions of nature as well as of print culture;
literary and artistic production; the insurgence of marginal groups
such as women and ethnic minorities; comparative political institutions
and ideologies; the emergence of modern states, institutions, loyalties,
and cosmopolitan cultures; and economic and social developments
like new world slavery, industrial society, and global migration.
All of these emphases are reflected in undergraduate offerings and
supported by a graduate program connecting the four area studies
by five supraregional themes. Through these we examine the global
contexts and impact of European ideas and culture (Texts
and Contexts), political institutions (Comparative
Political Cultures), and economic and social movements (Capitalism
and Empire; Race,
Ethnicity and Gender). Historians of the British Isles pay as
much attention to the Atlantic as to
the European contexts of that subject. Several members of other
area groups (Latin America, United States, Asia) have complementary
European research interests.
Faculty in European History
William Chase: Bill Chase's longstanding research interests center on understanding the motivations behind group political behavior during the interwar years in the USSR. His recent book, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939, explores the tensions between political imperatives, deep-seated social behaviors, and human agency. His present research projects uses the assassination of Leon Trotsky to examine conspiratorial worldviews, threat construction, group identities and behavior, and political violence among communists in the USSR, Spain, Mexico, and the United States in 1935–40. This interest extends to his teaching, most notably his course on Comparative Witch Hunts, which focuses on the witch hunts of early modern Europe, the Stalinist mass repression of 1936–38, the Red Scare in the post-WWII United States, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Each of these projects and classes reflects his broader interest in issues of comparative political cultures. In addition, he teaches an array of courses on Russian and Soviet history, Russian and Soviet Cities, World Cities in Historical Perspective (which explores urban history, urban planning and design, and urban life in a comparative context), and various seminars for graduate and undergraduate students.
Seymour Drescher Seymour Drescher is a University Professor of History. His principal works include Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (1977), Capitalism and Antislavery (1987), From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (1999), and A Historical Guide to World Slavery, coedited with S.L. Engerman (1998). His most recent work, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (2002), was awarded the 2003 Frederick Douglass Prize by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the study of slavery, resistance, and abolition in 2003. In our graduate program Drescher has conducted seminars on the expansion of Europe in global perspective, the historiography of European imperialism, and comparative slavery and abolition.
Neal Galpern Neal Galpern is an associate professor of history. He has studied social change and religious choice in early modern Europe. His interests now extend to the relations between culture and politics in Mussolini's Italy and in civil-war Spain. He teaches an introduction to the Renaissance and an honors course on France, Spain, and Italy in the 20th century.
Janelle Greenberg Janelle's teaching and research interests lie in the areas of medieval and early modern Western European law and political thought, with an emphasis on England. Her publications include Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England, with Corinne C. Weston (1981); "St. Edward's Laws and the Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution in Stuart England" in English Historical Review (1989); and The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: The 'Laws' of Edward the Confessor in Early Modern Political Thought (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).
Orysia Karapinka Orysia Karapinka specializes in 18th- and 19th-century Russia. She teaches a wide variety of undergraduate courses, including Russian History surveys, Comparative Views of Freedom (from England to China, via Europe and Russia) and a new course on modernism. She also teaches graduate courses in Russian history (social, economic, and intellectual), and is currently developing a new course that looks at Russia as a steppe society.
Irina Livezeanu Irina Livezeanu specializes in modern East Central Europe. She has written on nationalism and nation-building in 20th-century Romania, and on Poland and Soviet Moldova. Her current research on the New Generation and the Avant-Garde in Romania, 1914–47 examines the careers of intellectuals and artists in the cross-winds of domestic and international politics. Her publications include “Generational Politics and the Philosophy of Culture: Lucian Blaga between Tradition and Modernism,” Austrian History Yearbook 33 (2002), “The Romanian Holocaust: Family Quarrels,” EEPS 16, 2002, and Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic Struggle, 1918–1930 (Cornell, 2000), Heldt Prize recipient. She teaches courses on East Central Europe, Modern Eastern European Jewry, Comparative European History, and Film and History.
Jonathan Scott Jonathan Scott arrived in the department in 2002, as Carroll Amundson Professor of British History. His research interests include early modern British history in European contexts, in particular the impact upon English development of the United Provinces; early modern European political thought and its classical and religious content, especially that of the English revolution; and perceptions of the physical environment, especially of land and sea, and their relationship to national and global self-perceptions.
Gregor Thum Gregor Thum is the DAAD Visiting Professor for German and Central European History. His research interests are modern Germany's cultural relations to the East Central and Eastern European world, German perceptions of Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th century, the history of forced migrations in Europe, and the formation of the European identity during the 20th century. He teaches courses on modern German and Central European history. His publications include a book on the cultural history of the city of Wroclaw, a former German city that became Polish after Second World War.
Bruce Venarde is the department's European medievalist. His research centers on medieval Christian institutions and practices in their social and cultural contexts, in particular monasticism, gender and sexuality, holiness, popular and elite culture, and Latin literature in the 11th and 12th centuries. His new book is Robert of Arbrissel: A Medieval Religious Life. In addition to undergraduate courses in medieval history, Western civilization, and medieval Latin, he offers graduate seminars on early European history, global gender history, premodern Western slavery,and the core seminar in the department's Race, Ethnicity, and Gender program.
Joseph White: Nineteenth- and 20th-century British labor and social history; European socialism.
Recent Books
 >Bruce Venarde Robert of Arbrissel |
 William Chase Enemies Within the Gates |
 Seymour Drescher The Mighty Experiment |
 Gregor Thum Die fremde Stadt—Breslau 1945 |
