Draft:Börries Kuzmany

Börries Kuzmany (born 1977) is an Austrian historian and slavicist. He is a professor of Central and Eastern European History at the University of Vienna.

Academic biography

Kuzmany studied history and Russian philology at the University of Vienna and Paris-Sorbonne University; he also spent a year at the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center in Moscow. He graduated in 2003 with a thesis on Soviet Jewish history. In 2009, he received his PhD in a double degree (Cotutelle) from the universities of Vienna and Paris-Sorbonne with a thesis on the Galician border town of Brody. This study was later translated into English and Ukrainian. In 2024 he was habilitated for Modern and East European History with a monograph on the history of non-territorial autonomy in Europe.

Kuzmany was an Erwin Schrödinger fellow at the Central European University in Budapest, and an APART fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After receifing an ERC Starting Grant in 2017, he moved to a tenure track position at the Department for East European History at the University of Vienna. In 2022 he was a COST-Action visiting fellow at the European University Institute, and a visiting professor at the Lviv Polytechnic National University in 2024.

Research focus

Kuzmany’s field of study is the history of Europe between the late 18th and the 20th century. He focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, in particular the Habsburg Empire, Poland, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. His research interests include the history of nationalism, cultural diversity, borders, and languages, as well as urban and Jewish history. His ERC project on non-territorial autonomy tackled the intellectual and political history of this group rights’ approach to accommodate national diversity in multi-ethnic states. In collaboration with the COST action European Non-Territorial Autonomy Network he co-edited a textbook on non-territorial autonomy.

Awards

• 2009 Fritz T. Epstein Prize of the German East European Studies Association for a thesis in East European history
• 2012 Richard G. Plaschka Prize for extraordinary merits in the field of East European history
• 2017 Prize of the City of Vienna for extraordinary merits in the field of humanities
• 2023 Anthony D. Smith Article Prize for his article “Objectivising national identity: The introduction of national registers in the late Habsburg Empire” in Nations and Nationalism.

Important publications

• Brody. A Galician Border City in the Long Nineteenth Century. Brill, Leiden/Boston 2017, ISBN 978-90-04-28801-0.
  • Also available in German, ISBN 978-3-205-21197-6[1], and Ukrainian, ISBN 978-966-8853-94-4.
• Non-Territorial Autonomy. An Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2023). Edited together with Marina Andeva, Balázs Dobos, Ljubica Djordjević and Tove Malloy.[2]
• Nationalities Papers, 50/5 (2022), Accommodating National Diversity within States: Territorial and non-territorial approaches since the late 19th century. Special issue edited together with Matthias Battis and Oskar Mulej.[3]
• Vom Umgang mit nationaler Vielfalt. Eine Geschichte der nicht-territorialen Autonomie in Europa (in German). De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston 2024, ISBN 978-3-11-131443-3.[4]

External links

• Literature by and about Börries Kuzmany in the German National Library catalogue
• Börries Kuzmany on the website of the Department of Eastern European History of the University of Vienna
• Börries Kuzmany on the website of the ERC project Non-Territorial Autonomy as Minority Protection in Europe. A political and intellectual history of a travelling idea, 1850-2000