Dr Maria Falina, Visiting Fellowship 2024/25

Short biography

I am a historian of modern and contemporary Eastern Europe. My research focuses on intellectual history and history of political thought. I am particularly interested in the history of democracy, religion, nationalism, and state-building as well as issues of memory and political uses of the past. Currently I am developing two separate lines of inquiry: the first is about the history of democracy in interwar East Central Europe; the second is about the role of religion in the Russian illiberal project in the 21st century.

Since 2023 I am based in Utrecht University, where I work at the Political History section. Prior to I was an Assistant Professor of European history at Dublin City University (2016-2023), a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at University College Dublin (2013-2016), and a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at CEU, Budapest (2011-2013).

Visiting Fellowship May 25 – June 8

Motivation

While at the Institute, I will be working on a paper investigating the role of temporality in political thought. More specifically, I am looking at the immediate post-WWI period in East Central Europe, the so-called Wilsonian moment, and at how different conceptions of time and historicity coexisted and replaced one another. The end of war made Europeans particularly sensitive to the themes of time, death, and renewal. The tensions between the past and the future played out differently in various national and political cultures; this interplay is most evident in contexts where old imperial political structures were being replaced by newly established or heavily rethought nation-states. My work asks how by paying attention to different temporalities we can get a better insight into political thought of the time, with special attention paid to the issues of democracy, social justice and nation- and state-building.

List of publications (a selection)

Maria Falina. Religion and politics in interwar Yugoslavia: Serbian nationalism and East Orthodox Christianity. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350282063

Maria Falina. “Religious Diversity and Equality in Interwar Yugoslavia.” In Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 2021, 50(4): 539-559. https://doi.org/10.1177/0008429820978967

Maria Falina. “Narrating democracy in interwar Yugoslavia: From state creation to its collapse.” In Journal of Modern European History 2019, 17(2): 196-208.  https://doi.org/10.1177/1611894419835750

Judith Devlin, Maria Falina & John Paul Newman, eds. World War I in Central and Eastern Europe: Politics, conflict and military experience. I.B. Tauris, 2019.

Balázs Trencsényi, Michal Kopeček, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Maria Falina, Mónika Baár, and Maciej Janowski. A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ and Beyond, Part I: 1918-1968. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198737155.001.0001

Balázs Trencsényi, Michal Kopeček, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Maria Falina and Mónika Baár. A history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Volume II: Negotiating Modernity in the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ and Beyond, Part II: 1968-2018. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org./10.1093/oso/9780198829607.001.0001

Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Mónika Baár, Maria Falina and Michal Kopeček. A history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Volume I: Negotiating Modernity in the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’. Oxford University, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737148.001.0001