Biography
John Raimo is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern Europe with a particular focus on transnational histories of the book, reading, and publishing. Key research interests of his also include cultural transfers, sociological fields, intellectual networks, and the history of scholarship. Funded in part by the DAAD and Fulbright grant programs, John earned a PhD from New York University with a dissertation on publishing houses’ postwar construction of a transnational European culture and identity between Czechoslovakia, France, east and west Germany, and Italy. During his doctorate, he was an invited researcher at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and the École normale supérieure (Ulm). John’s doctoral thesis, “Republic of Readers: Politics of Reading and Publishing Across Postwar Europe, 1945-1970,” contests both period and post-1990s accounts of the Cold War’s geopolitical divisions of European identity within and between these countries as well as more broadly across the Iron Curtain. The revision of this manuscript into a monograph is his first project as a Max Weber Fellow. John’s second project at the EUI consists of a conceptual and cultural history of European political asylum stretching from the early nineteenth century to the immediate postwar era. In this and other research, he draws upon methodologies from art history, literary history and studies, media studies, and sociology.