This project connects the economic history of the late 19th and early 20th century with the recent trend of looking at Austria-Hungary as an imperial/colonial actor in relation to the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. Unconventionally but productively using the dissolution of the monarchy as its conceptual starting point, which offers insights into the less visible practices and meanings of the empire before 1918, it aims at revealing 1) how Austro-Hungarian imperialism reached Southeast Europe and integrated it into its economic sphere, 2) the place of this economic space between the European and global ones, and 3) how its post-WWI transformation from more direct forms of asset ownership to indirect ones created a laboratory of financialization of capitalism. The continuity of Austro-Hungarian businesses in the face of economic nationalist policies after 1918 highlights the importance of their previous practices of local embedding for the persistence of this space after the political structure that supported business expansion disappeared. This reinterpretation of Austro-Hungarian presence contributes to the understanding of the embedding of economic activity through interactions, how these interactions created structural features for the economy, and how the legal and political changes after 1918 did not change the interactional embeddedness, while the reconfiguration of structures still changed the face of capitalism to a more financialized one.

Gábor Egry is a historian, Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, currently István Deák Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and director-general of the Institute of Political History, Budapest. His research interests are nationalism, everyday ethnicity, politics of identity, politics of memory, economic history in modern East Central Europe. He held fellowships at Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, New Europe College, Bucharest, he was a Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar at Stanford University and Fernand Braudel Fellow at the EUI, Florence. Author of five volumes in Hungarian and several articles. among others in European Review of History, Slavic Review, Hungarian Historical Review, Südost-Forschungen. His last monograph Etnicitás, identitás, politika. Magyar kisebbségek naconalizmus és regionalizmus között Romániában és Csehszlovákiában 1918-1944 [Ethnicity, identity, politics. Hungarian Minorities between nationalism and regionalism in Romania and Czechoslovakia 1918-1944]) received an Honorable Mention from the Felczak-Wereszyczki Prize of the Polish Historical Association, and he received the Mark Pittaway Article Prize of the Hungarian Studies Association in 2018. Between 2018 and 2023 he was the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project Nepostrans – Negotiating post-imperial transitions: from remobilization to nation-state consolidation. A comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe.

Hosted by the Institute for European Studies and cosponsored by the History department.

At independence, African states inherited liberal constitutions enshrining multiparty democracy. However, within a decade, many collapsed into military dictatorships and one party-regimes and elections lost their significance. The democratization process of the late 1980s and early 1990s led to the drafting of ‘new’ constitutions that reinstated competitive elections. The reintroduction of multiparty democracy entailed that elections were going to be genuinely contested between several candidates, with the possibility that opposition leaders could wrestle power from the incumbent leaders. Many constitutions or electoral laws adopted following this wind of change provide for the possibility of aggrieved individuals and/or entities to seek legal redress in courts of law or other quasi-judicial bodies, usually on specified grounds. This phenomenon is now compounded by the increased use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the electoral process. Almost all presidential election disputes in the last ten years in Africa have revolved around failure or alleged tampering with the ICT facilities in the electoral process. It would, therefore, seem that ICTs, although helpful in increasing efficiency in the electoral process, provide possible new and cleaner ways of stealing elections. This new development presents new challenges to courts as often ICTs are adopted by Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) without appropriate changes to the electoral laws to enhance transparency and accountability. This paper analyses how the courts are facing the challenge of increased use of technology in elections and explores the way forward in terms of progressive interpretation and proactive adjudication of election matters.

Dr. O’Brien Kaaba, Lecturer, Department of Public Law, and Assistant Dean of Research, University of Zambia

Public Registration

In the mid-nineteenth century, decades after independence in Latin America, borderlands presented existential challenges to consolidating nation-states. This talk examines how and why these spaces became challenging to governments and what their meaningfulness is for our understanding of the development of a global world by examining one of those spaces: the Trans-Andean, an Argentine-Chilean borderland connected by the Andes mountains and centered on the Argentine region of Cuyo. It answers these questions by interweaving three narratives: Chilean migration to western Argentina; mountain-crossing Argentine rebels; and the formation of plans for railroads to cross the mountains.

Out of these narratives emerges a twofold argument that, on the one hand, locates the causes and stakes of foundational national conflicts in Argentina in a Pacific-facing Trans-Andean and, on the other hand, sees the Trans-Andean as part of mid-nineteenth-century globalization, thus connecting national conflicts, non-national geographies, and globalization. As a result, this history challenges dominant narratives about social and political conflicts at this formative moment in Argentine and Latin American history while opening up discussion on the methodologies and meaningfulness of transnational, borderlands, and global histories.

Kyle E. Harvey is an Assistant Professor of History at Western Carolina University. He is a social historian whose current research focuses on spatial histories of Argentina and Chile. His research engages with broad questions of historical geography, human mobility, capitalism, technology and expertise, and materialist interpretations of history. He received his BA in History from the University of Michigan and his MA and PhD from Cornell University. His research has been published in the Journal of Latin American Studies and Historia Crítica. His book, In Place of Mobility: Railroads, Rebels, and Migrants in an Argentine-Chilean Borderland, was published in 2024 by the University of North Carolina Press as part of its David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History.

“Exile,” wrote Edward Said, “is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.”

Join Oleksandra Shtepenko, an exiled Ukrainian scholar, Cornell virtual scholar under threat, and visiting professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU) in Poland, for a roundtable discussion of her first-hand experiences as the war in her homeland continues. Along with her NCU collaborators Anna Skubaczewska-Pniewska and Iwona Rzepnikowska, she will address these and other crucial questions: How can we rebuild lives, both in the flesh and of the mind, when war rips open new, unhealable borders? Can intellectual work be reimagined under these circumstances, together with institutions and communities that challenge existing paradigms?

The roundtable will be moderated by Anindita Banerjee (Comparative Literature), Shtepenko's Cornell host and virtual collaborator.

Respondents will include Cristina Florea (History, Cornell) and Zenon Wasyliw (History, Ithaca College).

About the Speakers

Oleksandra Shtepenko is an Institute of International Education scholar, Cornell Virtual Scholar Under Threat, and visiting professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU) in Poland. Iwona Rzepnikowska is an associate professor of literary studies at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU) in Poland.Anna Skubaczewska-Pniewska is an associate professor of literary studies at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (NCU) in Poland.

Hosts and Sponsors

This event is hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature and Global Cornell.