Berghahn Books Eastern Europe Unmapped: Beyond Borders and Peripheries

Arguably more than any other region, the area known as Eastern Europe has been defined by its location on the map. Yet its inhabitants, from statesmen to literati and from cultural-economic elites to the poorest emigrants, have consistently forged or fathomed links to distant lands, populations, and intellectual traditions. Through a series of inventive cultural and historical explorations, Eastern Europe Unmapped dispenses with scholars' long-time preoccupation with national and regional borders, instead raising provocative questions about the area's non-contiguous-and frequently global or extraterritorial-entanglements. Review "This collection joins a growing dissatisfaction on how we see, interpret, and portray Eastern Europe...[It] is refreshingly rich in references to lesser known recent texts on Eastern Europe, many of which have been neglected in the Anglophone literature." - Journal of Soviet & Post-Soviet Politics & Society "Eastern Europe Unmapped lays the conceptual and empirical groundwork for a substantial new body of research. Building on a trend in the field of East European history away from the old East-West diffusion paradigm and toward transnational history, it offers an insightful critique of two dominant scholarly paradigms." - Austrian History Yearbook "The volume's big achievement is its 'unmapped' thesis...German and East European language/comp lit specialists and adventurous interdisciplinarians will find a lot that is useful in Eastern Europe Unmapped, a smart and eclectic analysis of human geographical landscapes." - Sehepunkte "This is an exciting collection that appears at a moment when scholars in eastern European studies are exploring new modes of connecting postsocialism and postcoloniality. It makes an original contribution to this emerging subdiscipline, and is highly likely to stimulate new scholarship." - Catherine Baker, University of Hull About the Author Irene Kacandes holds The Dartmouth Professorship in German Studies and Comparative Literature. She edits the “Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies” series for de Gruyter Verlag and was President of the German Studies Association from 2015 to 2016. Yuliya Komska is Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Icon Curtain: The Cold War’s Quiet Border (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and a co-author of Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave, 2018). She has recently written about the transatlantic impact and memory of Radio Free Europe in both East and West.