Re-Locating Jewish History in Habsburg Central Europe

For a long time, historians designated the Jews of Europe as the “eternal other” in a series of binaries: Christian vs. Jewish, Gentile vs. Jewish, European vs. Jewish, non-Jewish vs. Jewish, and so forth. This is also true for Habsburg and Central European Jewish history. Mirjam Thulin and Tim Corbett, however, argue that pluralism was a common experience in formerly Habsburg Central Europe. In conversation with Larry Wolff, they will reevaluate the traditional categories applied in historical and cultural discourse and seek to relocate the field of Jewish studies within the broader Habsburg Central European context.

Please note this is an in person event that will be recorded, but not live streamed.

Dr. Mirjam Thulin is a New York-based independent scholar of Central European Jewish culture, history and religion and an affiliated research fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz, Germany. She has taught at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She received her doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 2011. In 2014/15 and 2020/21 she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, and in 2019-20 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Her first book, based on her dissertation, was published as: Kaufmanns Nachrichtendienst: Ein jüdisches Gelehrtennetzwerk im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). Most recent publications include: “Le-Dor va-Dor oder Discontinuities? Family History as a Key Paradigm of German Jewish Studies,” in German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations, ed. Aya Elyada und Kerry Wallach (New York: Berghahn, 2023), 17-37; “Eine Promotionsbehörde für Rabbinatsstudenten? Die Hallenser Orientalistik und ihre jüdischen Studierenden im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Jüdisches Leben in Sachsen-Anhalt: Kultur, Musik, Gelehrsamkeit, ed. Regina Randhofer, Carsten Lange, and Kathrin Eberl-Ruf (Halle an der Saale: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2023), 234–254; “Jewish Families as Intercessors and Patrons: The Case of the Wertheimer Family in the Eighteenth Century,“ in: Jewish Culture and History 19.1 (2018), 39–55.

Tim Corbett is a historian based in Vienna. His research focuses on Jewish history, the Holocaust, and cultures of memory in modern Austria. He has held numerous visiting research and teaching positions in Austria and the United States, including as a Prins Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in 2015/16, and is currently a research associate at the Institute of Culture Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2021, his scholarship was recognized with a Michael Mitterauer Prize from Vienna University and a Prize of the City of Vienna for Outstanding Achievements in the Humanities. His most important publications are the monograph Die Grabstätten meiner Väter: Die jüdischen Friedhöfe in Wien (Böhlau, 2021), two special volumes of the Journal of Austrian Studies (Summer and Winter 2023), and articles in interdisciplinary journals such as Revue d’histoire de la Shoah (2022), Contemporary Austrian Studies (2020), Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust (2018), Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook (2018), and Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues (2018).

Larry Wolff is the Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University. At NYU he has previously served as Executive Director of the Remarque Institute and as Co-Director of NYU Florence at Villa La Pietra. His most recent book is (2023), and his other books include Postcards from the End of the World: Child Abuse in Freud's Vienna (1988), Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994), and The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010). He writes frequently about opera, publishing essays and reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Hudson Review. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Center for Jewish History, 15 West 16th Street, New York, United States