Christopher Wendt, PhD

Postdoctoral Researcher; Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Botany; Czechia

Christopher Wendt is a postdoctoral researcher at the Czech Academy of Science’s Institute of Botany in Brno, Czechia. He received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence in 2025. His dissertation went behind the myth of Austrian Tyrol’s innate conservativism to interrogate how its Catholic elites and “everyday” activists navigated the political, social, and ideological challenges of the interwar period. From 2018 to 2023, he was also a Junior Researcher in the ERC NEPOSTRANS project, where he focused on the dyanmics of the post-imperial transition in North Tyrol more broadly. Before that, he received an MA in Comparative History from the Central European University in Budapest. His current research, which focuses on the reception and implementation of “scientific forestry” knowledge in nineteenth-century Bohemia and Moravia, builds on his abiding interest in local, regional, and social history, while venturing on to the terrain of environmental history.

Statement of interest :

My current work on the history of forests and forestry in the Bohemian Lands has two interlinked aims. The first concerns tracing how knowledge aimed at moulding forests was received, adapted, and applied on Bohemian and Moravian estates throughout the nineteenth century, and how its implementation was carried out according to local legal, social, and cultural contexts. The second concerns evaluating the consequences of these changes for local people, who often had little formal say in the matter, and whose responses ranged from acquiescence to open defiance. I therefore seek to incorporate different theoretical tools, from models of knowledge circulation to James C.  Scott’s “forms of everyday resistance.” Looking forward, I am keen to widen my scope of vision, and to better understand how these developments worked across Habsburg Austria, including in Slovene-speaking areas of Carniola and Lower Styria. Finally, I am also interested in comparing how the dynamics of rising nationalism in the late nineteenth century affected forestry and the management of the environment and natural resources throughout the Empire.

Selected Publications:

•  “‘For everything, the local priest is a helper in adversity’: Catholic clergy and the new order in post-Habsburg Tyrol,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 31, no. 5 (December 2024): 757-89.
• “Formulating Germanness in the Banat: ‘Minority making’ among the Swabians from Dualist Hungary to interwar Romania,” National Identities 23, no. 4 (March 2021): 325–347.