Join us for an engaging colloquium on Thursday, June 5, from 16:15 to 17:45 (in person) at Freie Universität Berlin, FMI, Room A336 (Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin).

Convened by Sebastian Conrad, Michael Goebel, and Isabella Löhr, the session promises stimulating discussions in an academic setting.

We look forward to seeing you there!

About the talk:

The Habsburg Mayor of New York studies how much the future Depression-era three-term mayor of New York City, Fiorello LaGuardia, was affected by the eight years working and learning in Habsburg Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Reill’s talk emphasizes how the bustling, modern, immigrant-rich, Central European port and trade cities where LaGuardia lived affected the political transformations he helped bring about in New York City. On a micro level, this project aims to overturn much that we know about this famous political figure, offering a transnationally equipped LaGuardia to replace the provincial American one the historiography has presented thus far. On a macro level, The Habsburg Mayor of New York challenges not just what we know about the development of US progressivism in the early twentieth century, but also what we know of “Old Europe.”

Dominique Kirchner Reill is the incoming Director of the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies and a Professor in History at the University of Alberta. Until now, she was a Professor at the University of Miami and has just finished up two yearlong residency fellowships at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) Institute for Advanced Study and at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) of Aix Marseille Université. She is President of the Central European History Society, co-founder and co-organizer of the first Central European History Convention to be held in Vienna July 15-17, 2025, member of the board of the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, and member of the board of the journals Contemporary European History, Journal of Austrian-American History, and Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Her first book, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice, was published by Stanford University Press in 2012 and was awarded the Center for Austrian Studies’ Book Award and Honorable Mention from the Smith Award. Her next book, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire came out in 2020 with Harvard University’s Belknap Press and received an Honorable Mention from the Jelavich Book Prize. The Fiume Crisis was also translated into Croatian in 2024 and published by Ljevak. She is also underway at finishing up writing the last pages of her next book manuscript The Habsburg Mayor of New York: Fiorello LaGuardia about which she will be talking with us today.

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