John Deak

John Deak has been teaching at Notre Dame since 2009. He specializes in the history of Modern Central Europe and the First World War. Deak is broadly interested in European political culture, from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. He offers courses on central and eastern Europe including German History and the Habsburg Empire, broader courses on Europe in the Age of Revolutions and the World Wars, as well as courses in historical methodology and the philosophy of history. He is currently also expanding his repertoire into courses on Europe since 1945, history of the Belle Epoque, and Vienna in the Age of Freud. He is actively involved in the training of graduate students who work on a variety of topics, offering courses on theories of nationalism, the state, law, genocide, and justice, as well modern capitalism spanning the last three centuries.

 

His research interests is broad but focuses on the region broadly defined as central Europe. Within this region, he has been writing and publishing on topics which include political Catholicism and Fascism, the First World War, civil military relations, and authority and power associated with states and bureaucratic organizations. He has served on the editorial boards of Central European History and Administory and spends he free time sifting through book review requests with his dog, Ziggi the Schnauzer.

 

His first book, a political history of the Austrian Civil Service, received the Austrian State Prize for Social History in 2018. He is currently finishing a book (with Dr. Jonathan Gumz) on the state of emergency and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire in the First World War and starting another on a fatal encounter between a Dutch composer and a Hungarian army officer in the Swiss resort of Davos, 1909.