Fields of research

• Central, Eastern, and South-eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries
• Comparative empire
• European nationalism, borderlands, fascism
• Histories of sexuality and gender

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 in the nineteenth and 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 has already resulted in a major volume for Harvard University Press (2016) and in a planned edited volume for Cambridge University Press. In addition Judson is currently collaborating on a domestic history of Austria-Hungary during the First World War for Oxford University Press. 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