Tara Zahra
Biographic Data
| ID | 343810 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tara Zahra |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tara |
| FAMILY NAME | Zahra |
| SIGNATURE | ZAHRA T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 208 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
“You wish that you had been beaten…”
Intimate partner violence (IPV), specifically spousal emotional abuse, is an international concern in diverse settings and populations. However, knowledge gaps regarding the lived experiences of Arab women remain. To contribute to furthering the global understanding of IPV, we examined Jordanian women's experiences through structured interviews. Thirty women who experienced moderate-to-severe levels of emotional abuse were interviewed to share th…
A World of Contradictions
Journal Article A World of Contradictions: Globalization and Deglobalization in Interwar Europe Get access Tara Zahra, Tara Zahra Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of History and Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago, US Corresponding Author: Dr. Tara Zahra E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Peter Becker, Peter Becker University of Vienna, Austria Search…
Migration, Mobility and the Making of a Global Europe
In 2017–18, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei created a special installation addressing the refugee crisis in Prague. ‘Law of the Journey’ consisted of an enormous black inflatable raft, crowded with inflatable rubber people wearing lifejackets. Their human forms were clear, but they lacked faces. The raft hung from the ceiling at an angle, casting a dark shadow over a list of quotations from thinkers and writers, beginning and ending with two locals:…
Fin d'empire et genre de la déglobalisation (1914-1939)
Cet essai analyse les mouvements politiques et sociaux de l'entre-deux-guerres qui étaient mobilisés contre la globalisation et l'internationalisme. Comment ces mouvements, liés à l'effondrement des empires, en particulier les Empires austro-hongrois et prussien, étaient-ils genrés ? Dans leur effort pour isoler et protéger les sociétés de l'impact de la globalisation après la Première Guerre mondiale et la Grande Dépression, les mouvements anti-…
Objects of War
Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in fli…
Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge”
This article traces state practices for governing Roma in the late Habsburg Empire. In the years leading up to the First World War, Roma became troubling symbols of the limits of the Habsburg state's sovereignty over its borders and people. In their alleged resistance to authority, they seemed to embody both the failures of the Empire's "civilizing" mission and its efforts to control mobility. A growing number of Austrian authorities began to cal…
Paul Ginsborg. Family Politics
In Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900–1950, Paul Ginsborg observes that families are “perennially off-stage” in studies of the tumultuous twentieth century (xiii). He aims to insert family history “into a wider and deeper general history” by examining families in five states in the throes of violent revolution, dictatorship, war, and reconstruction (xiii). The cases are well chosen as they cover a broad geographic and …
Travel Agents on Trial
In the winter of 1889, a sensational trial in the small Galician town of Wadowice captivated the Austrian press and public. The defendants in the case were Jewish travel agents from the nearby town of Oświȩcim — known to the world today as Auschwitz. Oświȩcim, located at the juncture of Prussian, Russian and Austrian railway lines, had recently developed a booming emigration business. Since 1880, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans had tre…
The Lost Children
During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself. Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations procl…
Going West
“Going West” explores the potential of integrating East European History into broader histories of Europe and the world. Placing the history of Eastern Europe in a European context, I argue, may enable us to challenge the tropes of backwardness, pathology, and violence that still dominate the field. I also suggest that historians explore the extent to which conceptions of minority rights, development, and humanitarianism first developed in Easter…
For Their Own Good
Journal Article ‘For Their Own Good’: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945 Get access ‘For Their Own Good’: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945. By Julia S. Torrie. New York: Berghahn Books. 2010. xx + 269 pp. £50 (hardback). Tara Zahra Tara Zahra University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2011, Pages 161–163, https://d…
The Psychological Marshall Plan”
In 1940, Howard Kershner, director of European relief for the American Friends Service Committee, was stationed in Vichy France, where Quakers were organizing relief for refugees. He had witnessed any number of wartime atrocities in his years of service during the Spanish Civil War, including violence directed at civilians, bombings, starvation, and disease. Now he added a new item to the litany of wartime suffering: “One of the greatest tragedie…
A Human Treasure
Journal Article ‘A Human Treasure’: Europe’s Displaced Children between Nationalism and Internationalism Get access Tara Zahra Tara Zahra Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 210, Issue suppl_6, 2011, Pages 332–350, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtq053 Published: 22 January 2011
Enfants et purification ethnique dans la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre
À partir du cas de la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre, cet article démontre la centralité des enfants dans l'histoire de la purification ethnique. Pendant et après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les enfants devinrent à la fois des dépouilles de guerre et la cible de campagnes visant à créer des états-nations homogènes en Europe. Entre 1945 et 1948, trois millions d'Allemands tchécoslovaques furent expulsés de Tchécoslovaquie, alors que cet état lança…
“Prisoners of the Postwar”
In the aftermath of World War II, Austria once again achieved notoriety as a “prison of peoples.” In 1951, the Ost-West Kurier , a newspaper in Essen, decried the degrading mistreatment of Austria's so-called “prisoners of the postwar.” Men, women, and children were wasting away in former concentration camps and were denied citizenship rights, the right to work or to travel freely, and basic social protections, the newspaper reported. These “pris…
Imagined Noncommunities
Since the birth of mass political movements, European nationalists have lamented the failure of their constituents to respond to the siren song of national awakening. This article explores the potential of national indifference as a category of analysis in the history of modern central and eastern Europe. Tara Zahra defines indifference, explores how forms of national indifference changed over time, probes the methodological challenges associated…
Lost Children
The ‘Minority Problem’ and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands
In the aftermath of the First World War, a so-called ‘minority problem’ loomed large in European politics. This problem was understood, moreover, to be peculiar to central and eastern Europe. In fact, however, linguistic diversity was not a unique feature of the east, but also an ongoing challenge in states that had long claimed to have a unified national culture. This article compares policies of national classification and minority rights in Fr…
Teaching & Learning Guide for
Focus Questions How does the history of East Central European borderlands complicate traditional links (in both scholarship and politics) between nationality, ethnicity, language, and citizenship? Historians, as the article suggests, are increasingly interested in ‘transnational’ history, or histories which seem to transcend national borders and nationalist frameworks. In the case of German history, does this trend seem more likely to ‘normalize’…
Each nation only cares for its own
Franziszka Pollabrek, a Czech-speaking factory worker, was at her wits' end.In a scathing letter to the Austrian Ministry of Education in Vienna, she demanded that the state do something about her incorrigible teenage sons.Pollabrek expressed her frustration with the state's inaction in the face of what she perceived to be a disturbing wartime social crisis: "My boys will become nothing but thieves, liars, and murderers if you, dear Sirs, don't i…
Looking East
In recent years historians of Germany have increasingly turned eastward to explore the history of Germans and Germany in East Central Europe. This article situates Germanists’ growing interest in eastern “borderlands” in a set of overlapping contemporary political and theoretical concerns: historical debates on Nazism and the origins of the Holocaust, the influence of post‐colonialism and post‐colonial theory, and a broader movement to write Germ…
Reclaiming Children for the Nation
In September of 1899 the Czech National Social Party issued a stern warning to parents in Prague as the school enrollment season approached: “Czech parents! Remember that your children are not only your own property, but also the property of the nation. They are the property of all of society and that society has the right to control your conduct!” Czech and German nationalists in the Bohemian lands were hardly alone in claiming that children com…
Imagined Noncommunities
Since the birth of mass political movements, European nationalists have lamented the failure of their constituents to respond to the siren song of national awakening. This article explores the potential of national indifference as a category of analysis in the history of modern central and eastern Europe. Tara Zahra defines indifference, explores how forms of national indifference changed over time, probes the methodological challenges associated…
The ‘Minority Problem’ and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands
In the aftermath of the First World War, a so-called ‘minority problem’ loomed large in European politics. This problem was understood, moreover, to be peculiar to central and eastern Europe. In fact, however, linguistic diversity was not a unique feature of the east, but also an ongoing challenge in states that had long claimed to have a unified national culture. This article compares policies of national classification and minority rights in Fr…
Reclaiming Children for the Nation
In September of 1899 the Czech National Social Party issued a stern warning to parents in Prague as the school enrollment season approached: “Czech parents! Remember that your children are not only your own property, but also the property of the nation. They are the property of all of society and that society has the right to control your conduct!” Czech and German nationalists in the Bohemian lands were hardly alone in claiming that children com…
Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge”
This article traces state practices for governing Roma in the late Habsburg Empire. In the years leading up to the First World War, Roma became troubling symbols of the limits of the Habsburg state's sovereignty over its borders and people. In their alleged resistance to authority, they seemed to embody both the failures of the Empire's "civilizing" mission and its efforts to control mobility. A growing number of Austrian authorities began to cal…
The Psychological Marshall Plan”
In 1940, Howard Kershner, director of European relief for the American Friends Service Committee, was stationed in Vichy France, where Quakers were organizing relief for refugees. He had witnessed any number of wartime atrocities in his years of service during the Spanish Civil War, including violence directed at civilians, bombings, starvation, and disease. Now he added a new item to the litany of wartime suffering: “One of the greatest tragedie…
Migration, Mobility and the Making of a Global Europe
In 2017–18, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei created a special installation addressing the refugee crisis in Prague. ‘Law of the Journey’ consisted of an enormous black inflatable raft, crowded with inflatable rubber people wearing lifejackets. Their human forms were clear, but they lacked faces. The raft hung from the ceiling at an angle, casting a dark shadow over a list of quotations from thinkers and writers, beginning and ending with two locals:…
Going West
“Going West” explores the potential of integrating East European History into broader histories of Europe and the world. Placing the history of Eastern Europe in a European context, I argue, may enable us to challenge the tropes of backwardness, pathology, and violence that still dominate the field. I also suggest that historians explore the extent to which conceptions of minority rights, development, and humanitarianism first developed in Easter…
Travel Agents on Trial
In the winter of 1889, a sensational trial in the small Galician town of Wadowice captivated the Austrian press and public. The defendants in the case were Jewish travel agents from the nearby town of Oświȩcim — known to the world today as Auschwitz. Oświȩcim, located at the juncture of Prussian, Russian and Austrian railway lines, had recently developed a booming emigration business. Since 1880, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans had tre…
Lost Children
Looking East
In recent years historians of Germany have increasingly turned eastward to explore the history of Germans and Germany in East Central Europe. This article situates Germanists’ growing interest in eastern “borderlands” in a set of overlapping contemporary political and theoretical concerns: historical debates on Nazism and the origins of the Holocaust, the influence of post‐colonialism and post‐colonial theory, and a broader movement to write Germ…
Enfants et purification ethnique dans la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre
À partir du cas de la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre, cet article démontre la centralité des enfants dans l'histoire de la purification ethnique. Pendant et après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les enfants devinrent à la fois des dépouilles de guerre et la cible de campagnes visant à créer des états-nations homogènes en Europe. Entre 1945 et 1948, trois millions d'Allemands tchécoslovaques furent expulsés de Tchécoslovaquie, alors que cet état lança…
Reclaiming Children for the Nation
In September of 1899 the Czech National Social Party issued a stern warning to parents in Prague as the school enrollment season approached: “Czech parents! Remember that your children are not only your own property, but also the property of the nation. They are the property of all of society and that society has the right to control your conduct!” Czech and German nationalists in the Bohemian lands were hardly alone in claiming that children com…
Looking East
In recent years historians of Germany have increasingly turned eastward to explore the history of Germans and Germany in East Central Europe. This article situates Germanists’ growing interest in eastern “borderlands” in a set of overlapping contemporary political and theoretical concerns: historical debates on Nazism and the origins of the Holocaust, the influence of post‐colonialism and post‐colonial theory, and a broader movement to write Germ…
Each nation only cares for its own
Franziszka Pollabrek, a Czech-speaking factory worker, was at her wits' end.In a scathing letter to the Austrian Ministry of Education in Vienna, she demanded that the state do something about her incorrigible teenage sons.Pollabrek expressed her frustration with the state's inaction in the face of what she perceived to be a disturbing wartime social crisis: "My boys will become nothing but thieves, liars, and murderers if you, dear Sirs, don't i…
Teaching & Learning Guide for
Focus Questions How does the history of East Central European borderlands complicate traditional links (in both scholarship and politics) between nationality, ethnicity, language, and citizenship? Historians, as the article suggests, are increasingly interested in ‘transnational’ history, or histories which seem to transcend national borders and nationalist frameworks. In the case of German history, does this trend seem more likely to ‘normalize’…
The ‘Minority Problem’ and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands
In the aftermath of the First World War, a so-called ‘minority problem’ loomed large in European politics. This problem was understood, moreover, to be peculiar to central and eastern Europe. In fact, however, linguistic diversity was not a unique feature of the east, but also an ongoing challenge in states that had long claimed to have a unified national culture. This article compares policies of national classification and minority rights in Fr…
Lost Children
“Prisoners of the Postwar”
In the aftermath of World War II, Austria once again achieved notoriety as a “prison of peoples.” In 1951, the Ost-West Kurier , a newspaper in Essen, decried the degrading mistreatment of Austria's so-called “prisoners of the postwar.” Men, women, and children were wasting away in former concentration camps and were denied citizenship rights, the right to work or to travel freely, and basic social protections, the newspaper reported. These “pris…
Imagined Noncommunities
Since the birth of mass political movements, European nationalists have lamented the failure of their constituents to respond to the siren song of national awakening. This article explores the potential of national indifference as a category of analysis in the history of modern central and eastern Europe. Tara Zahra defines indifference, explores how forms of national indifference changed over time, probes the methodological challenges associated…
The Lost Children
During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself. Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations procl…
Going West
“Going West” explores the potential of integrating East European History into broader histories of Europe and the world. Placing the history of Eastern Europe in a European context, I argue, may enable us to challenge the tropes of backwardness, pathology, and violence that still dominate the field. I also suggest that historians explore the extent to which conceptions of minority rights, development, and humanitarianism first developed in Easter…
For Their Own Good
Journal Article ‘For Their Own Good’: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945 Get access ‘For Their Own Good’: Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945. By Julia S. Torrie. New York: Berghahn Books. 2010. xx + 269 pp. £50 (hardback). Tara Zahra Tara Zahra University of Chicago Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2011, Pages 161–163, https://d…
The Psychological Marshall Plan”
In 1940, Howard Kershner, director of European relief for the American Friends Service Committee, was stationed in Vichy France, where Quakers were organizing relief for refugees. He had witnessed any number of wartime atrocities in his years of service during the Spanish Civil War, including violence directed at civilians, bombings, starvation, and disease. Now he added a new item to the litany of wartime suffering: “One of the greatest tragedie…
A Human Treasure
Journal Article ‘A Human Treasure’: Europe’s Displaced Children between Nationalism and Internationalism Get access Tara Zahra Tara Zahra Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 210, Issue suppl_6, 2011, Pages 332–350, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtq053 Published: 22 January 2011
Enfants et purification ethnique dans la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre
À partir du cas de la Tchécoslovaquie d'après-guerre, cet article démontre la centralité des enfants dans l'histoire de la purification ethnique. Pendant et après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les enfants devinrent à la fois des dépouilles de guerre et la cible de campagnes visant à créer des états-nations homogènes en Europe. Entre 1945 et 1948, trois millions d'Allemands tchécoslovaques furent expulsés de Tchécoslovaquie, alors que cet état lança…
Travel Agents on Trial
In the winter of 1889, a sensational trial in the small Galician town of Wadowice captivated the Austrian press and public. The defendants in the case were Jewish travel agents from the nearby town of Oświȩcim — known to the world today as Auschwitz. Oświȩcim, located at the juncture of Prussian, Russian and Austrian railway lines, had recently developed a booming emigration business. Since 1880, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans had tre…
Paul Ginsborg. Family Politics
In Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900–1950, Paul Ginsborg observes that families are “perennially off-stage” in studies of the tumultuous twentieth century (xiii). He aims to insert family history “into a wider and deeper general history” by examining families in five states in the throes of violent revolution, dictatorship, war, and reconstruction (xiii). The cases are well chosen as they cover a broad geographic and …
Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge”
This article traces state practices for governing Roma in the late Habsburg Empire. In the years leading up to the First World War, Roma became troubling symbols of the limits of the Habsburg state's sovereignty over its borders and people. In their alleged resistance to authority, they seemed to embody both the failures of the Empire's "civilizing" mission and its efforts to control mobility. A growing number of Austrian authorities began to cal…
Objects of War
Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in fli…
Migration, Mobility and the Making of a Global Europe
In 2017–18, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei created a special installation addressing the refugee crisis in Prague. ‘Law of the Journey’ consisted of an enormous black inflatable raft, crowded with inflatable rubber people wearing lifejackets. Their human forms were clear, but they lacked faces. The raft hung from the ceiling at an angle, casting a dark shadow over a list of quotations from thinkers and writers, beginning and ending with two locals:…
Fin d'empire et genre de la déglobalisation (1914-1939)
Cet essai analyse les mouvements politiques et sociaux de l'entre-deux-guerres qui étaient mobilisés contre la globalisation et l'internationalisme. Comment ces mouvements, liés à l'effondrement des empires, en particulier les Empires austro-hongrois et prussien, étaient-ils genrés ? Dans leur effort pour isoler et protéger les sociétés de l'impact de la globalisation après la Première Guerre mondiale et la Grande Dépression, les mouvements anti-…
A World of Contradictions
Journal Article A World of Contradictions: Globalization and Deglobalization in Interwar Europe Get access Tara Zahra, Tara Zahra Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of History and Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago, US Corresponding Author: Dr. Tara Zahra E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Peter Becker, Peter Becker University of Vienna, Austria Search…
“You wish that you had been beaten…”
Intimate partner violence (IPV), specifically spousal emotional abuse, is an international concern in diverse settings and populations. However, knowledge gaps regarding the lived experiences of Arab women remain. To contribute to furthering the global understanding of IPV, we examined Jordanian women's experiences through structured interviews. Thirty women who experienced moderate-to-severe levels of emotional abuse were interviewed to share th…
Political science (17 works) · History (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Archaeology (10 works) · European history and politics (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Central European national history (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Economic history (7 works)