Transformative Podcast

What can the lens of football tell us about the transformation years in East Germany? In this episode, historian and journalist Jan Mohnhaupt and Jelena Đureinović (RECET) reflect upon this question. After a series of books about the history of animals, Jan’s new book Der geteilte Rasen: Fussball in den Wendejahren 1989-1992 (The Divided/Shared Pitch: Football during the Transformation Years) tell...

What does the lens of sex work and sexuality tell us about the history of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe? In this episode, Priska Komaromi (Humboldt University) discusses tourism aimed at Westerners that developed in socialist Hungary from the 1960s onwards, often marketed in a sexualized way. She tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about the interactions between Western tourists and Hu...

How might we capture historical events like war and revolution from street level? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Claire Morelon (University of Manchester) tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about how private courtyards, shop windows, graffiti and darkened public transport might shed light on changes in political regimes. She reflects upon how conflict shaped a place as far away from t...

How have the Croats in Argentina preserved their identity, memory, and community? How have they transmitted it across generations to this day? Following the collapse of the fascist Independent State of Croatia (1941–1945), around 10,000 Croats fled to Perón’s Argentina and settled there. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Nikolina Židek (IE University Madrid) discusses the formation of...

Why have the histories of work and the histories of welfare been told separately, and what happens when we bring them together? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Alexandra Ghiț (GWZO Leipzig) focuses on domestic servants, social workers, and users of welfare in interwar Bucharest to argue that “histories of welfare provision are histories of work, and histories of work are histories o...

What does the Non-Aligned Movement look like on a plate? Starting with a series of informal dinners in Rijeka and expanding into various events and workshops, Kevin Kenjar (University of Rijeka) pays homage to the Non-Aligned Movement through exploration and fusion of various culinary traditions coming from its numerous member states. In this episode, he reflects on Naan-Aligned Cooking and, with...

The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation analyzes the pivotal year of 1989 and the transformation processes that resulted from a historical perspective. It brings research done over the past five years at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) into dialogue with cutting-edge scholarship by political scientists, sociologists, historians, literary scholars...

Ever since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party of China (CCP) has used the historical memory of WWII to legitimize its rule. Exactly how the historical conflict gets framed, and which parts of it are highlighted while others get omitted, has been subject to dramatic changes – just like China itself – as the different CCP leaderships adjusted and readjusted...

What does football tell us about Ukraine's political and economic transformations after the collapse of the Soviet Union? In this episode, Kateryna Chernii (ZZF Potsdam) tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about football in the Soviet Union and Ukraine, the legacies of communism, the role of elites and what is happening in this sphere in the context of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Chernii...

In this episode, Hannah Käthler (RECET) talks to RECET's Founding Director Philipp Ther, whose newest book Der Klang der Monarchie (Suhrkamp, 2025) tells the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the prism of the music it created and was shaped by. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven were instrumental in holding the empire together. "Habsburg Pop" reached the masses and became a global export. T...

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian men of fighting age have been subject to a wartime draft. Yet many have chosen to flee the country, often risking perilous border crossings in search of safety. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Irena Remestwenski (RECET) speaks with Sofie Rose (University of Southern Denmark), who unpacks the emotional...

In the aftermath of World War I, what used to be the Habsburg Empire split up into several nation states. But where to draw a border between the new Austrian Republic and the Hungarian nation state? In this episode, Leonid Motz (RECET) speaks with Hannes Grandits (HU Berlin) and Katharina Tyran (University of Helsinki) about their new edited volume The Disputed Austro-Hungarian Border: Agendas, Ac...

What is postsocialism and how has it been experienced around Eastern Europe? Ambiguously, according to Jill Massino, the editor, with Marcus Wien, of a new volume on the topic: Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe: History Doesn’t Travel in One Direction (Purdue University Press, 2024). From white-collar workers whose fates diverged, to sexual minorities who enjoyed some years of unprecedented...

Is there socialist tropical medicine? Why is it important to write state-socialist Eastern Europe in the global history of medicine after 1945? In this episode, Bogdan Iacob tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about socialist tropical medicine, its development, purposes and understanding within Eastern Europe. He explains how state-socialist Eastern Europe shaped the assistance to postcolonial states...

Did Eastern Bloc states “aid and abet” terrorism, as US politicians like Ronald Reagan charged? Declassified archives in postsocialist Europe reveal a much more complicated story, as Daniela Richterova (King’s College London) explains. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, she tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) how Czechoslovak officials could “talk and at times align” with violent non-state...

Do historians have a responsibility to engage in public and political discussions? How can one balance the role of a public intellectual, an activist and a scholar? How can scholars rise to the occasion in the face of a changing media world and widespread disinformation campaigns? Can their institutions protect them from attempts to silence them through SLAPP suits (Strategic lawsuits against publ...

In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Radka Šustrová (RECET) speaks with historian and human rights scholar Steven L. B. Jensen. Drawing on his recent keynote at the rountable titled “European Strategies for Strengthening Social Partnership and Labour Rights” in Vienna and his influential work on the global history of human rights, Steven Jensen explores how economic and social rights wer...

What does social justice mean in a European context—and how has that meaning evolved through dictatorship, democracy, and division? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Radka Šustrová speaks with historians Martin Conway and Camilo Erlichman about their new co-edited volume, Social Justice in 20th Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Together, they explore the conceptual, p...

This episode captures (the beginning of) a conversation between cultural studies scholar Magda Szcześniak (University of Warsaw) and historian Jan Tomasz Gross (emeritus, Princeton University) who – while studying Polish contemporary history during the past decades – published a book co-authored by Stephen Kotkin on "uncivil society" in 2010. It offered a powerful explanation for the implosion of...

To what extent were Soviet engagements with the Third World characterized by solidarity during the Cold War? And to what extent did these same engagements conceal imperial ambitions? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Alessandro Iandolo (UCL) talks to Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about how concrete development projects could be viewed quite differently by the different actors involved. He...

Studying social justice reveals the promises a regime - liberal or otherwise - makes to its citizens. It also reveals how citizens interpret these promises. But to what extent should we use the term “social justice” to understand societies excluding entire cohorts - most notoriously Jews and Roma in territories occupied by the Nazis during World War II? By focusing on exactly this period, and taki...

Who were the communist women who designed and implemented the socialist project of women’s emancipation not only in Poland, but around the world? How did they conceptualize emancipation? How to write about them today, when any association with communism arouses resistance, and communists are either erased from history or stereotypically captured as traitors to the nation? We talk with Agnieszka Mr...

Vienna’s walls are full of signs, stickers and graffitis in South Slavic languages. How does this come about? – In this episode, Leonid Motz (RECET) talks to Prof. Katharina Tyran (University of Helsinki) about Vienna’s linguistic landscape and how it is shaped by Post-Yugoslav migrants. What can we learn about power dynamics from the linguistic practices in which they engage? Tyran highlights how...

In this episode, Małgorzata Mazurek (Columbia University) engages in a discussion with Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ (RECET) on how Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau, Polish economists in the interwar period, responded to local and global challenges such as poverty and the Great Depression. Embedded in the Second Polish Republic — a fragile political entity — the economists in question generated innovative i...

How is land central to socialist and postsocialist transformations in Southeast Europe? In this episode, Katarina Kušić (University of Vienna) tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about land as more than an object of policy, the perspectives on studying it and the importance of rural areas and marginalised actors. Dr. Katarina Kušić is a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow at the Researc...