'Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland'

A Public Lecture with Cristina Florea on her New Book 'Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland'

Assistant Professor Cristina Florea (Cornell University) is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, interested in the interactions between German and Russian power (their competition for territory and influence) across this space, as well as the consequences these interactions have had for the people living in between. She will discuss her seminal new book Bukovina together with Dr Anca Cretu, Dr Alex Voronovici, and Professor Roland Clark (Liverpool University).

 Date : 12 May 2026

Time : 15:00-16:30

Teams link:

https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/344015607798037?p=2zZufgxJCoC4yNIDnw

About Cristina Florea’s book:

Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book, Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.

Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups—rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles—who lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.

A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe.