Jeremy King

Jeremy King studied Soviet history in college, but fell prisoner one summer to the charms and tragedies of Central Europe. Trained at Columbia University as a historian of Austria-Hungary and its successor states, he has lived for several years in Prague, Budapest, Vienna, and a few other formerly Habsburg cities, as well as Berlin. His book Budweisers into Czechs and Germans presents a case study of how German and Czech leaders nationalized politics between the revolutions of 1848 and the genocide and mass expulsions of the 1940s. A second book will explore a bold but flawed attempt in the final years of imperial Austria at using law to reduce ethnic or racial conflict—not by privileging Germans over Czechs, Italians, Jews, or anyone else, but by mandating equality of rights for individual citizens as well as for the ethnic groups or races to which they supposedly belonged. A third book project concerns the remaking, through real estate, of how Czechs have interacted with each other and with their government since the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

At Mount Holyoke, King teaches courses on Habsburg Central Europe (Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Yugoslavia, etc.), the politics of liberalism, fascism, and communism, the Second World War, “race” and law, and European public policy. He also teaches History 151: Modern and Contemporary Europe.

King has been awarded research fellowships by Harvard University, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fulbright Commission of the Czech Republic, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In the summer of 1989, he held an internship at the Hungarian section of Radio Free Europe in Munich.