Dr. John Paul Newman

Dr. John Paul Newman has been appointed a Visiting Fellow within the Fellowship Programme „Violence in East and West“ in July 2024. John Paul Newman is Associate Professor in Twentieth-century European History at Maynooth University, Ireland. He researches the modern history of the Southeastern and East-Central Europe, with a particular focus on Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. His first book, Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State-Building, 1903-1945, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. He is currently preparing  on a monographic study of the birth, life, and afterlife of the Illyrian movement in the South Slav lands, provisionally titled 'Illyria Unbound: Reflections on Nation and Identity in Modern Central Europe' (under contract with Oxford University Press).

During his stay in Konstanz, he will be developing a project that addresses the institutionalization of military force and the popular - societal experiences and responses of this institutionalization in three post-imperial and post-conflict spaces in modern Europe: the post-Ottoman Balkans (after the Russo-Turkish war, from the 1878 onwards), post-Habsburg Central and Eastern Europe (after the First World War, from 1918 onwards), and post-Romanov Eastern Europe (after the Russian Civil War, from 1921 onwards). The project analyses how in the aftermath of perceived national-liberation the new states of post-imperial Europe sought to monopolize military power and consolidate rule through the establishment of national armies.