“[Bukovina] was a place where one might be born under one regime, grow up under another, come of age under a third, and die as a citizen of a completely different state. Within a single lifetime, people experienced multiple forms of government and were subjected to successive cultural and political projects.”

In Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton UP: December 2025), Cristina Florea tells the story of a place that no longer appears on maps, but continues to be shaped by competing national ambitions and the afterimages of successive empires.

Drawing on sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, the book integrates stories of rural Ukrainians, Romanians, Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles who lived side by side in Bukovina—all navigating constant change and reinvention. 

Today, Bukovina is once again at the center of geopolitical realignment, Florea said: “It is home to refugees fleeing eastern Ukraine and shaped by the afterlife of yet another empire: the Soviet Union. The story I tell in this book, as it has become painfully clear, has not ended.”

After the book's publication on December 16, Florea spoke with the College of Arts and Sciences about how the small borderland of Bukovina found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended through the rest of Europe.

“Enlightenment-era imperial projects, liberalism and its limits, competing nationalisms, two world wars, occupations and liberations, postwar reconstruction, and the dilemmas of governing diversity,” she said, “all unfold here almost as if we were watching Europe’s history on fast-forward.”

Cristina Florea is the Institute for European Studies Director's Faculty Fellow. She is an assistant professor of history (A&S) and frequent media voice on current events in Central and Eastern Europe.

Read A&S interview

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