Robert Pyrah

Biography

Robert’s work explores questions of national identity and identification in post-Habsburg East-Central Europe, c. 1918-present, through historical research that is frequently collaborative and aspires to conceptual innovation. Output includes the innovative volumes (co-ed. with Marius Turda), ‘Re-Contextualising East Central European History’ (Oxford, 2010) and (co-ed. with Jan Fellerer), ‘Lviv and Wrocław: Cities in Parallel?’ (Budapest and New York, 2020), alongside a recent podcast. The latter was conceived as a public history initiative exploring the reasons for rising illiberalism in Central Europe and how to counter the trend, featuring /inter alia/ Timothy Garton Ash: shows.acast.com/pseudoscience.
Previously, Robert co-authored a large AHRC project that proposed a novel definition of ‘subcultures’ as a better way of understanding the complex expressions of sub- or trans-national identity in East-Central Europe in a way that the term ‘minority’ often masks or elides (co-ed. with Turda and Fellerer, ‘Identities In-Between In East-Central Europe’, London, 2019). Other research has explored national identity from the angles of culture (‘The Burgtheater and Austrian Identity’, Oxford 2007), or else through memory (forthcoming book on Lviv and Polish constructions of the city’s past).
Having previously been a Research Fellow at Wolfson, Robert now returns with a new project entitled ‘Virtual nationalisms’. This will investigate the role of websites in the taxonomy of historical sources. Robert invites proposals for collaboration from adjacent disciplines including media studies and internet research, with a (peer-reviewed) pilot paper setting out the parameters of this research available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14790963.2024.2332039

Research Interests
History, Historical Studies, Central Europe, East-Central Europe, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, Nationalism, Nationalism Studies, National Identity