MacArthur Winner to Deliver Scholars’ Convocation

Zahra is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and the winner of a 2014 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

“I'm really excited that we'll be hosting a ground-breaking historian of Eastern European nationalism and the history of childhood a week after she won a MacArthur ‘genius grant’ for her new project on mass emigration out of the Habsburg Empire,” says Edward Cohn, assistant professor of history.

Zahra’s work centers on the history of childhood within the context of nationalism and state formation in Eastern Europe. She wrote Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948. Her second book, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II, analyzes how the “best interests” of children were defined in nationalist terms.

Her new project posits that mass emigration from Eastern Europe played an important role in defining ideas of freedom and community through Europe and America.

“Historians of the U.S. have been interested for years in how Eastern European immigrants changed America, but she asks a really fascinating question: how was Eastern Europe changed by the departure of nearly 10 percent of its population?” says Cohn.

Zahra received a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and a master’s and doctorate from the University of Michigan.

Her talk is part of the ongoing Scholars’ Convocation series.

A second MacArthur Fellow grant winner, cartoonist and graphic memoirist, Alison Bechdel, will speak during Convocation on April 8, 2015.

NPR this month ran a story about the legacy of poet Amy Clampitt ’41 who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992.