Vojtech Pojar

Resonating with the recent resurgence of interest in historicizing the construction and political uses of the concept of race in East Central Europe, my postdoctoral project examines its role in state-socialist regimes. Through a comparative analysis of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, it reveals the enduring – though not central – position of this concept in their political and expert cultures, and identifies at least three distinct “languages of race” within these dictatorships. This project draws on Vojtech’s detailed knowledge of eugenic, and more broadly, biopolitical, discourses in East Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, acquired in the course of his research for his recently defended doctoral dissertation (2024, Central European University’s Best Dissertation Award). Focusing on the Habsburg and post-Habsburg countries, the dissertation emphasizes the importance of the imperial context and its legacies, as well as the transnational connections within the (post-)imperial setting, in shaping early eugenic discourses in the region. It also offers a novel explanation for the non-linear, yet ultimately fatal, trajectory of their radicalization, particularly from the late 1920s onwards. The research project conducted at NEC grew out of the striking observation that many of the radicalized actors, concepts, and networks persisted from the interwar years through the early decades of the state-socialist regimes.