Prof. Dr. John C. Swanson

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
History

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
January 2022 – June 2022
FRIAS School of History
August 2009 – July 2010

Last Update: 31.08.2022

Curriculum Vitae

I am a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe with interest in questions concerning minorities, belonging, and nationness. I also have worked as a documentary filmmaker.

At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga I teach courses on Central Europe, Eastern Europe, general European history, and historical methods. I have led study tours to Europe for American students concerning the history of the Holocaust. I also served as Department Head in Chattanooga for six years. Prior to moving to Tennessee, I taught for fifteen years at Utica College in upstate New York. My Ph.D. is from the University of Minnesota, and I received a B.A. in music and political science from Boston University.

My most recent long-term project examined a minority population in Central and Eastern Europe: German speakers in Hungary. That project culminated in 2017 with the publication of my book: Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Europe (University of Pittsburgh Press), which won the 2018 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize and the 2019 Hungarian Studies Association Book Prize. It appeared in German translation in 2020 (Pustet Verlag). This project examines the issue of minority making and the imbedded struggle within minority formation over the meaning of such categories as “German.” My main query is how these “German-speaking Hungarians” became Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) by the 1930s. This is not a story of individuals gaining German consciousness, but rather I document the process by which the meaning of “German” changed in reference to the Swabians of Hungary—the largest non-Magyar group in post-First World War Hungary. This project also resulted in the documentary film About a Village, which has been screened at festivals and conferences in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, and Japan.

Selected Publications

Fassbare Zugehörigkeit: Deutschsein im Ungarn des 20. Jahrhunderts. (Pustet Verlag, 2020).
Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth Century Hungary. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).
“Explaining German Expulsions through the Lens of Postcatastrophy: New Discussions concerning the Shoah and the Expulsions,” in The Afterlife of the Shoah in Central Eastern European Cultures: Concepts, Problems, and the Aesthetic of the Postcatastrophic Narration, edited by Anna Artwinska and Anja Tippner. (Routledge, 2022), 192-204.
“Ouvrir des portes : les photographie comme moments épisodiques,” [photographic essay] Siggi, le magazine de sociologie, printemps 2 (2021), 32-39.
“Thinking Historically: The Holocaust Study Tour,” in After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the approaching post-witness era, for edited book, edited by Charlotte Schallié, Helga Thorson, and Andrea van Noord (University of Regina Press, October 2020), 206-216.
“The State arrives in Hungarian Villages: Magyarization and the Making of Minorities at the Village Level,” in Kooperatives Imperium: Politische Zusammenarbeit in der späten Habsburgermonarchie, edited by Jana Osterkamp. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 285-296.
Otto Bauer külpolitikája és a Magyar Tanácsköztársaság,” [“Otto Bauer’s Foreign Policy Regarding the Hungarian Soviet Republic”] AETAS (Hungarian Historical Journal) (1994/3), 57-70.
Otto Bauer as Austrian Foreign Minister: Rethinking Bauer’s Anschluss Policy,” in T. M. Islamov and A. I. Miller, eds., Avstro-Vengriia: Opyt mnogonatsional’nogo gosudarstva (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 1995), 142-154.
The Sopron Plebiscite of 1921: A Success Story.” East European Quarterly, 34/1 (March 2000), 81-94.
The Remnants of the Habsburg Monarchy: The Shaping of Modern Austria and Hungary, 1918-1922. (Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 2001).
Modern Europe: Sources and Perspectives from History. Edited with Michael Melancon, Auburn University. (New York: Longman Publishers, 2003).
Minority-Building in the German Diaspora: The Hungarian-Germans,” Austrian History Yearbook, volume 36 (2005): 148-166.
Nation, Volk, Minderheit, Volksgruppe: Die deutsche Minderheit in Ungarn in den Begriffskämpfen der Zwischenkriegsära.” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 55 (2006): 526-547.
Nineteenth-Century Europe: Sources and Perspectives from History. Edited with Michael Melancon, Auburn University. (New York: Longman Publishers, 2007).
The Second World War and Its Aftermath: Ethnic German Communities in the East,” in Germans and the East, edited by Charles Ingrao and Franz A.J. Szabo (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008), 347-361.
The Body of the Empire,” in A Central European Empire: The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, edited by András Gerö (Budapest: Officina 96 and London: New Holland Publishers Ltd, 2008).

FRIAS Project

Superfluous Humanity: Lili Jacob, Bilky, and the Auschwitz Album (2022)

My project examines the life of Lili Jacob (1926-1999) and the story of her home community of Bilky (today in western Ukraine) in order to tell the history of Jewish life in a borderland region of Europe in the decades before the Holocaust; as well as to tell the history of the Jews who appear in the images that today have become so common in publications and museum exhibits (photographs contained in the Auschwitz Album). By employing a microhistorical methodology to the study of Lili and her village, I will be able to delve deep into the local, rural world of Subcarpathian Rus’ (western Ukraine) in order to discover what microhistorians call: “the fundamental experiences and mentalités of ordinary people.”

Minorities and ethnic Categorization: The struggle over the Meaning of “Being German” (2009-2010)

My research project attempts to problematize the process that could be seen as the transition of rural German speakers in Hungary from German-speaking Hungarians to Volksdeutsche during the twentieth century. I accomplish this by describing the discrepancy and the struggle between a local, tangible understanding concerning what “German” meant for German-speaking villagers and more völkisch or ethnic senses propagated by Germany, Hungary, and even the Hungarian-German leadership. This allows me to explain how ethnic and national categories began to dominate political and popular discourse by the early twentieth century and point to how individuals started to employ such categories to “think the nation” and “think the minority.”