Dr Katalin Stráner

Katalin Stráner is a historian of modern Europe, with focus on the history of science, urban history, and migration. Her work explores the mobility of ideas and people: how knowledge is produced, communicated, and transformed by people in motion across various cultural, intellectual, social, and political contexts – and how knowledge is used to shape those contexts in turn. Research interests include the academic and popular reception of Darwinism and evolution; the history of Hungary and Central Europe in a transnational context; the study of knowledge production and transfer in the long nineteenth century; the role of the city and urban culture, including the urban press, in the circulation and transformations of knowledge; migration and exile.

She is currently working on two projects: both aim to understand the way mobility and cultural encounter matter in writing transnational histories of knowledge. In a cultural history of Darwinism in Habsburg Hungary, through a closer reading of the translation and reception Darwin's and his contemporaries' work, she explores how the translation of Darwin’s work, and informing and educating the public became part of a patriotic agenda — at the same time when publishing, reading, and discussing Darwin and other Western scientific literature also became a form of bourgeois sociability in the Habsburg Empire. More broadly, this work explores the role of local knowledge and empire in knowledge production. In a new project, she examines the history of migration from East Central Europe to Britain over the last 150 years, exploring how the transformation of knowledge, stereotypes, and public debates about migration, as well as more personal experiences of immigration have shaped Britain's ideas of and relationship with Europe. 

Before joining UCL, she taught at the Universities of York, Manchester, and Southampton, and held research and teaching positions in Florence, Mainz, and Budapest. She is Review Editor of the journal Jewish Culture and History and part of the International Committee of the European Association for Urban History.

Major publications

• 'The Hungarian Association for the Advancement of Science and its Public in Budapest, 1841-1896,' Urban Histories of Science: Making Knowledge in the City, eds. Oliver Hochadel and Agustí Nieto-Galan, Routledge 2018, 59-79.
• 'Wissenschaft im öffentlichen Raum: Die Rezeption des Darwinismus in ungarischen Zeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts,' Darwin in Zentraleuropa: Die wissenschaftliche, weltanschauliche und populäre Rezeption im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, eds. Herbert Matus and Wolfgang L. Reiter, LIT Verlag 2018, 395-423.
• 'Wessen Wissenschaft, und in welcher Sprache? Gemeinschaften und Sprachen der Naturwissenschaften in (nicht nur) Budapest 1860er und 1870er Jahre,' Wandlungen und Brüche: Wissenschaftgeschichte als politische Geschichte, eds. Johannes Feichtingerer et al., Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018, 221-228.
• 'Budapest and Hungarian Transatlantic Migration: Image and Agency in Public Discourse, 1881-1914, Journal of Migration History 2 (2016): 352-374. 
• 'Natural Science in Hungarian of Hungarian Natural Science? László Dapsy, Hungarian Darwinism, and the Origins of the Publishing House of the Hungarian Society of Natural Science' [in Hungarian], Korall Társadalomtörténeti Folyóirat 16 (2015): 97-115.
• Nomadic Concepts in the History of Biology, edited with Jan Surman and Peter Haslinger, thematic section in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48, Part B (December 2014): 127–184. 
• Nomadic Concepts: Biological Concepts and Their Careers Beyond Biology, edited with Jan Surman and Peter Haslinger, special issue in Contributions to the History of Concepts 9 (2014): 1-89.  

Teaching

• How to be an Alien? Migration in Modern Europe (Studies in European History, Advanced module)
• The Cultural Cold War in Europe, 1917-1989 (Thematic module)