Department of History

Holly Case is a historian of modern Europe whose work focuses on the relationship between foreign policy, social policy, science, and literature in the European state system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII, was published in May 2009. The book shows how the struggle for mastery among Europe’s Great Powers was affected by the perspectives of small states. She also wrote The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond, published in June 2018. The book sets out to explain when and why people started thinking in terms of “questions,” and how it altered their sense of political possibility. She has also begun writing a history of the role of consuls and consular reform in transforming the international system over the course of the last two centuries. Case has written on European history, literature, politics and ideas for various magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, The Chronicle Review, Aeon, The Nation, Dissent, The Times Literary Supplement, Eurozine, and Boston Review, and is a regular columnist for 3 Quarks Daily.