New Books in European Politics

In this episode, hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Farid Hafez to discuss his most recently published book Governing Islam in Austria and Germany: From Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford UP, 2026). Hafez’s recent work centres on the comparative analysis of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the German rule in Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon, and in particular their respective treatment of Muslims in each case to then in turn shed light on the current governing of Muslimness in both. Farid Hafez is an assistant professor in International Relations at William and Mary, and also a senior researcher at Georgetown University.

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Racism and Antiracism in Divided Germany (Cornell UP, 2026) addresses how racism expresses itself and what it means to be antiracist by tracing the history of racism and antiracist activism in East, West, and unified Germany. As far-right extremism surges in Germany today, Germans from across the political spectrum are increasingly grappling with the presence of racism in a country that is still coming to terms with its Nazi past. However, these public discussions are not always historically informed, and racism in Germany is often dismissed as a fringe phenomenon rather than part of mainstream society
The contributions in this volume juxtapose the experiences of multiple racialized groups to collectively show how racism, rightwing extremism, and antiforeigner violence have long been embedded in the center of both East and West German society. Germany's unification in the 1990s produced a deadly collision of two distinct yet overlapping cultures of racism that persists today. The volume also highlights Germany's long overlooked history of antiracist activism, providing historical lessons on how to combat racism today.
Contributors: Rita Chin, Christopher Ewing, Sheer Ganor, Daniela Gress, Christopher A. Molnar, Paige Newhouse, Jannis Panagiotidis, Hans-Christian Petersen, Patrice G. Poutrus, Thomas Prennig, Bill Sharman, Brian Van Wyck, Johanna M. Wetzel
Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.
Guests: Michelle Lynn Kahn (she/her) is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond and author of Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Lauren Stokes (she/her) is an Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University and author of Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford University Press, 2022)

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Nationalism’s global resurgence has upended societies. With the rise of the Polish nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and American Jewry’s swift reaction to its law punishing people who allege Polish complicity in Holocaust crimes, both sides have revived old stereotypes. Stark-Blumenthal argues that American Jews’ disgust with Polish nationalism ought to be checked by America’s centuries-old embrace of white supremacy. Poles and Jews: A Call for Myth Reconstruction (Academic Studies Press, 2024) confronts both the anti-Polonism deeply embedded in the American Jewish community and Poland’s enduring relationship with antisemitism. Armed with two decades of research and in-depth interviews with scholars, community leaders, and laity in Poland and the U.S., Stark-Blumenthal dispels myths and considers new approaches to this relationship.

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In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast host Andrea Talabér talked to Michal Frankl, Doina Anca Cretu and Lidia Zessin-Jurek about the new edited volume Refugees and Citizens in Twentieth-Century East Central Europe: An Unlikely Refuge? We discussed the reception of the ERC-project the volume is based on at a time of heightened narratives about refugees and the place of Central and Eastern Europe in the scholarship, reflecting on the current relevance of the project.
The Zotero bibliography for the project is openly available, please click here to access it.
You can purchase a copy here. The book is also available Open Access here.
The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.
Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more: here

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In this episode, I speak with Dr Amy King of Bristol University about her book, The Afterlife of a Fascist Murder: Giacomo Matteotti in Myth and Memory, 1924–2024, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.
The year 2024 marked a century since socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti's assassination. Widely commemorated in Italy, he's often remembered within a national narrative of antifascist resistance. But how was this narrative built and how has the far right responded? This Element traces the construction and mobilisation of Matteotti's memory over the last century, analysing the role of grief in the early antifascist movement, and identifying the role memory played in bringing together Allies, partisans and political parties during the construction of the democratic Republic. Based on primary sources from international archives, it also adds a transnational lens to the study of a figure so often thought of in national terms. The Element closes by examining how far-right parties whose lineage traces back to Mussolini's regime have engaged with the afterlife of a man whose murder is an evergreen reminder of the centrality of violence to Fascism in its earliest days.
Dr. Amy King is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of The Politics of Sacrifice: Remembering Italy’s Rogo di Primavalle, which examines the memory of a 1973 arson attack on a far-right family in Rome during the Years of Lead. The book won the First Book Prize from the American Association for Italian Studies in 2024 and was published in Italian by Donzelli last year.
Chris Millington is Professor of Modern European History and lead of the Histories and Cultures of Conflict research group at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of eight books including Murder in Marseille: Right-Wing Terrorism in 1930s Europe ((Manchester University Press, 2025), The Invention of Terrorism in France, 1904-1939 (Stanford University press, 2023), and France in the Second World War Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

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