Current research projects
Professor Judson’s current research seeks to revise the ways in which we understand the history of Central and Eastern Europe in three specific ways. First, he seeks to remove the nation and the self-described nation-state as normative lenses for understanding European state building practices and Europeans’ social and cultural commitments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Secondly, his work seeks de-pathologize the history of Central and Eastern Europe by placing the histories of these regions firmly in a broadly comparative European context. Thirdly, he investigates how self-described empires and nation states in the region developed fundamentally imperial practices of rule, how such imperial practices developed and were refined thanks to transnational and global connections. This research resulted in Judson’s book The Habsburg Empire. A New History (Harvard University Press 2016), which is currently being translated into eleven languages. With Professor Mark Cornwall (Southampton) Professor Judson is co-editing The Cambridge History of the Habsburg Monarchy 1790-1918, an international project that involves thirty authors from Europe and the United States. In addition Judson is collaborating with Tara Zahra (Chicago) on a domestic history of Austria-Hungary during the First World War for Oxford University Press. His next projects seek to explore the global imperial visions and designs developed in mid-19th century imperial Austrian society. As part of his interest in gender and sexuality studies, Professor Judson is also investigating a case of female-to-male sex change in fin-de-siècle Vienna.