The KHK would like to welcome Professor Monika Baár to the Centre. Prof. Baár is a Humboldt Fellow and will be hosted by the Käte Hamburger Kolleg in Duisburg until the end of August 2022. Monika Baár just finished a István Deák Visiting Professorship at the Harriman Institute for the study of Russia, Eurasia, and East Central Europe (Columbia University). Having been a Professor of Central European Studies at the Institute for History at Leiden University since September 2015, Baár will take up a Professorship in the History of East-Central and South-Eastern Europe at the European University Institute in Florence as of September, 2022.
Her early career interests included the history of historiography, cultural history, and political thought in East-Central Europe. She is author of the monograph Historians and Nationalism: East Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2010) and co-author of the two-volume book A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe (Oxford University Press, 2016). More recently her interest has shifted to the history of disability and animal studies and she is at present completing the ERC Consolidator Grant Rethinking Disability: the Global Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Historical Perspective, which was also turned into a comics series. Baár will reflect on this project in the Centre's upcoming Research Colloquium on 21 June 2022. Publications in this field include the article 'Disability and Civil Courage under State Socialism: the Scandal about the Hungarian Guide Dog School' (Past & Present, 227: 1, May 2015) and a co-edited special issue 'Rethinking Transition in Eastern Europe through the Lens of Disability' that is forthcoming in the journal Problems of Post-Communism.
Monika Baár established a relationship with the Centre since 2020, when she participated in our conference ‘Urgency and Responsibility in Global Cooperation Covid-19 and Beyond’ (October 2020) and contributed to the panel on ‘Urgent Action: Strategies of Mobilization and Cooperation around Human Rights’, chaired by Nina Schneider. During her current stay, Baár will focus on a project titled 'Disabled Refugees and Disabling Displacement: International Norms and Local Realities'. An outline of this project is included in Baárs' fellow profile.
