Historian
If clear purpose and sheer happenstance are the heartbeat of history, they have also been vital to my meandering career as a historian. It started at Yale University, in the annus mirabilis of 1989, when I went off to study modern Europe and wound up watching communism collapse with people who would write prizewinning books about it. I myself wrote a dissertation on the Left—From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914 (Duke University Press, 2002)—before heading right for Washington, DC to edit Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Soon I was also writing on Swiss banks in the Second World War, producing a documentary film on the bombing of Auschwitz controversy (They Looked Away, 2003), and being touted as a Holocaust scholar. From there it was on to genocide writ large: I landed a Fulbright for Bosnia-Herzegovina and lurched into debates over how to remember the brutal wars of Yugoslav secession. Yet more than mass murder, my abiding passion was for the Sarajevo assassination of June 28, 1914, the so-called spark for World War I. Thanks to fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie program at the University of Birmingham (UK), I researched the memory of the political murder and wrote the book Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War I (Oxford University Press, 2022). I’m now working on the sequel: a screenplay for a feature film on “Sarajevo 1914”; and a second book, tentatively entitled “The Footprints of Gavrilo Princip”.
Explore my work
The wide windy paths of my love for the modern European past have brought other welcome attainments as well, like a co-edited collection on interwar Central Europe—Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 (Berghahn, 2019); articles in diverse journals, including the American Historical Review, Washington Post, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Austrian History Yearbook, French History, and Dani (Bosnia); and trips to Budapest and Berlin, Prague, Kraków, Vienna, the Danube and Dublin with awesome students like those I taught at McDaniel College in Maryland (1998–2022). Moreover, in the very best instance of life’s innate happenstance, I met my wife, Patrycja Antoszek, in an elevator at the Library of Congress. Now I do history at the Catholic University of Lublin, in Poland, where Pat’s a professor of American literature and we live with Antek, Kaja, and a cat called Masza.
