John Deak is helping write the next chapter in the story of one of Austria’s oldest historical research institutions.
An associate professor in the Department of History, Deak is one of the first non-Austrian members of the Commission for Modern Austrian History.
Members of the commission have historically been Austrian themselves, but the definition of “Austrian” has changed in the organization’s lifetime.
Established in 1897, the commission tasked academic historians with curating and publishing the history of the Habsburg Empire, a territory comprising parts of 13 different modern nations. At the end of World War I, the empire collapsed, and a realm that had previously encompassed much of Central Europe became the far smaller country of Austria.
As Austria’s dominion shrank, so too did the scope of the commission. But Deak’s new membership is a sign that the organization is returning to its roots.
“They’re trying to be more international, transnational now in order to capture the shared past of all these peoples of Central Europe,” Deak said.
As a scholar of the Habsburg Empire and past winner of the Austrian State Prize in History who can read several European languages, Deak is ideal for the role. And as a frequent patron of Austrian archives and reader of the commission’s publications, he’s excited to accept.
“I have a lot of respect for the commission’s historians, whose works I have read and used and appreciated,” Deak said. “To be included with them is an honor.”
A larger community
Deak has been a Habsburg buff for longer than he’s been a historian, beginning when he researched his family history in grade school. When he learned his family immigrated from Central Europe before World War I, he discovered a new way of seeing history.
Before the 20th century, European lives didn’t sit neatly within national borders — they were multilingual, and ethnicity wasn’t a factor in daily life or politics. Deak said that studying Central European history by individual countries often gives a skewed, artificial view of how people lived.
“The idea of nations has basically sucked all the past up into a vacuum and reinterpreted it,” he said.
“What we can easily forget is part of the work of a historian — which is most of the time sitting in an office, reading and writing and being alone — is that you’re part of a larger community that’s working together.”
The search for a more accurate picture of the past is why Deak is a historian of the Habsburg Empire — a world without modern boundaries. The effects of the commission’s work are already felt past Austrian borders, Deak said, as its publications are an essential resource for researchers throughout the world. Many historical sources related to the history of Central Europe are stored in Austrian archives, so scholars of the region who don’t live in Austria struggle to access them.
“If you live in western Ukraine and you’re interested in western Ukraine, a lot of the archival sources aren’t available in Kyiv, and getting to Vienna from western Ukraine is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming,” Deak said. “So the commission works to make available sources for all of these people who have an imperial Central European inheritance.”
The commission publishes edited transcriptions of historical sources, as well as expert academic works of interpretive history. As a new member, Deak will review and produce these publications in joint projects that involve multiple scholars and governments.
For Deak, who frequently takes undergraduates to Europe to visit battlefields and World War I memorials as part of his Great War and Modern Memory course, the opportunity offers a chance for him to further explore his own research interests and to deeply connect with Central Europe’s historical community.
“What we can easily forget is part of the work of a historian — which is most of the time sitting in an office, reading and writing and being alone — is that you’re part of a larger community that’s working together,” Deak said.
Reinterpreting history
Deak embraced another collaborative opportunity in writing his upcoming book, tentatively titled “The First World War and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire,” co-authored with military historian Jonathan Gumz of the University of Birmingham.
The book counters a widely accepted narrative of the fall of the Habsburg Empire. For a long time, Deak said, historians have argued that the Habsburg Empire was too old-fashioned to survive in the 20th century, and that its institutions couldn’t accommodate its multinational population.
“Therefore, they think of the First World War as just a strong wind that blew a condemned building down,” Deak said.
But the book retells the Empire’s fall as something more complex. In his research, Deak sees a strong state with a long history of adapting to crises and strong constitutions, led by politicians who believed in justice and the rule of law. For the people of Central Europe, the collapse of their governments was unexpected and calamitous.
To understand how it happened, Deak said, historians can’t dismiss the details. The book explores the intricacies of World War I and how a state of emergency — accompanied by the weakening of civil rights and the rule of law — destroyed a vibrant empire.
“Things like democracy, constitutions, rule of law — we tend to think that they are impervious to attacks, but they’re actually really fragile,” Deak said. “We have to take care of them.”
Deak and Gumz have been working on the book for a decade, with a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities bringing them to the finish line. Now the two historians just need to complete the final chapter, though Deak said the research they found was so rich it couldn’t fit within the bounds of the already-large manuscript.
Luckily, that means Deak has plenty of inspiration for future projects, and he has already picked a topic for his next book. In paging through military court records, he found the story of a duel gone wrong between a composer and an officer of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1909.
“It’s an international court case and a scandal,” he said. “It’s an interesting story, and there are moral lessons about honor and equality before the law.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on January 26, 2026.