Holly Case

Brown University
Most recent fellowship dates
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Holly Case is Professor of History at Brown University. Her research interests focus on 19th and 20th century Europe and cover inter alia questions of territorial revision and treatment of minorities, WWII, the history of European renewal and federative schemes, and the relationship between social policy, culture, and foreign relations. She is the author of the award-winning book Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009) and co-editor of the volumes Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003, with Norman M. Naimark) and The Global Impact of 1989 (special issue of Global Society, vol. 24, no. 1, January 2010, with Florian Bieber).

IWM Fellowships
September 2016 – June 2017
June-August 2018
August 2019-January 2020

Fellowships

Fellowships
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Program

The war in Ukraine has raised a matter of crucial importance: the question of taint. The day Russia invaded Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin predicted that Ukraine and its supporters in the West would “kill innocent people just as members of the punitive units of Ukrainian nationalists and Hitler’s accomplices did during the Great Patriotic War.” His prognosis assumed that the historical trajectory of Ukrainian independence was tainted by nationalist collaboration with Nazi Germany during the Second World War and could never come clean. Tracing tainted structures and ideas across time is a common feature of historical inquiry, but one fraught with dangers and open to manipulation. Tracing Taint seeks to derive methodological lessons from an in-depth exploration of WWII symbolic politics as they relate to the war in Ukraine and the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia, alongside taint-tracing claims as they relate to the WWII history of cybernetics and the problem of “dirty data” in computer science and machine learning.

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Program

A history of consuls and consular reform in and around Southeastern Europe and their role in transforming the international system over the course of the last two centuries.

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Program

The project is twofold, one entails continuing research for a history of the role of consuls and consular reform in transforming the international system over the course of the last two centuries. The second is tentatively titled “The Temperature of Our Time.” Out of small details measured across time and space—from owner’s manuals to packaging labels to philosophical works to private correspondence and overheard speech—the project will compile histories of the present by extracting various “vital signs” from historical and present sources.

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Program

Description: My project covers a period in modern history— roughly 1810 to 1950—when “questions” reigned. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wrote his views on the “Eastern question” through the character of Levin in Anna Karenina, the future president of Czechoslovakia penned over 700 pages on the “social question,” and a German novelist expressed his immoderate views on the “oyster question.” When and why did people start thinking in terms of “questions,” and what did it mean?

Publications