Researching Minorities in Twentieth-Century Hungary: Tangible Belonging and Borderland Identity

John C. Swanson will discuss two of his larger research projects. The first one resulted in the award-winning publication Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) as well as his documentary film About a Village whose subject is the Hungarian village of Máriakéménd. The second project is ongoing and is a triple biography of Lili Jacob (1925-1999), the woman who discovered the Auschwitz Album—a collection of photographs by SS men documenting the Holocaust—at the end of the Second World War, her home village of Bilky (now in Ukraine), and the album itself.

John C. Swanson is Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he has taught since 2012. He is the author of the 2001 book The Remnants of the Habsburg Monarchy: The Shaping of Modern Austria and Hungary, 1918–1922 and, more recently, Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary (2017), which won the 2018 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize from ASEEES and the 2019 Hungarian Studies Association Book Prize.

Image credit: An ethnographic map of the Habsburg Monarchy from 1855. Wikimedia.