Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 26, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the East Central European Center for a book talk by Cristina Florea. Moderated by Ofer Dynes.
Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton University Press, 2025) follows one border province, now divided between Romania and Ukraine, as it passed from the Habsburg Empire to Romania, the Soviet Union, and independent Ukraine from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century. Drawing on archives and published sources in six languages, the book traces how successive regimes sought to remake the region in their own image, and how Bukovinans — rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans; urban German-speaking Jews and Poles — navigated constant reconfiguration and reinvention. A borderland that never fit its maps comfortably, Bukovina was an early testing ground for state-building projects that eventually extended across Europe. A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe.
Cristina Florea is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, where she specializes in the history of modern Central and Eastern Europe, empire and borderlands, and the Soviet Union. Her first book, Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton University Press, 2025), traces how a multiethnic Habsburg province was remade, partitioned, and ultimately destroyed by the successive regimes that claimed it. The book won the 2026 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize and received the Honorable Mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, both from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Her current project examines Vienna under four-power occupation after 1945, when the city became both a laboratory of postwar reconstruction and a frontline of the emerging Cold War. Her work has appeared in Past & Present, Central European History, and New German Critique, and her essays in Foreign Affairs, the New York Review of Books, and TIME. She received her PhD from Princeton University and was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University.
