Hanebrink

Paul Hanebrink
Professor of History
Schools: Ph.D., Department of History, The University of Chicago (2000)
Office Address: 101A Van Dyck
Email Address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Phone Number: 848-932-8540

Specialty: Modern Eastern and Central Europe; Hungary; histories of religion, nationalism, and antisemitism

Research Interests: Modern East Central Europe, with a particular focus on Hungary; the history of nationalism and antisemitism as modern political ideologies; the place of religion in the modern nation-state.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My teaching and research interests include the transnational history of Europe, the history of modern East-Central Europe, with a specialization in modern Hungarian history, and the history of nationalism, antisemitism, and religion in modern Europe.

My first book, In Defense of Christian Hungary, is a study of the ideology of Christian nationalism in Hungary during the interwar era. In it, I analyze the competition between secular and religious nationalists to define what the idea of “Christian Hungary” meant, how it should be realized, and whom it would include and exclude.

My second book, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, analyzes the history of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as a pan-European political idea from its origins to the present-day. In it, I trace the circulation of this myth across national boundaries and analyze how the political function of the myth was refashioned as anti-Communist politics in Europe changed over the course of the twentieth century. The book also explores the entanglement of the myth with contemporary Holocaust memory, as well as its survival after 1989 in the conspiratorial fantasies of the far right on both sides of the Atlantic.