Research
“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” is a tale of broken promises and frustrated aspirations, of a radical transformation in how adolescents became adults since the Enlightenment. Land reforms and mass education, ideologies of meritocracy and individualism, new oceanic routes, and shattering empires freed adolescents from becoming their parents. Choice was not necessarily freeing; as the dissertation shows, it was tormenting. The resulting crisis – the necessity, liberty, and risk of designing one’s adulthood – is a hallmark of modernity.
In the heart of the story is an intergenerational pact. In traditional society, children were limited in designing their own lives. Apprenticeships, university education, and hands-on agricultural training at home began early, leaving little room for alternatives. An intricate range of mechanisms – both formal like guilds and informal like oral examinations – made it difficult to move freely between life courses. But they also virtually guaranteed success. The intergenerational pact of traditional society offered children a safe path to stable life in exchange for robbing them of the right to choose.
This pact broke down in the nineteenth century. The concentration of capital and the rise of industry made it difficult to follow the parental footsteps. States grew unwilling to protect exclusionary privileges, promising to open schools and careers to talent instead. Now school grades could ruin even the most strategic family plan. The book shows how families coped with the crisis, not least by forging new aspirations. Instead of stability, the public sphere was filled with a dynamic plethora of prospects: colonial exploits, industrial jackpots, but also the popular if unexciting career of the civil servant, shielded from the free market by a permanent contract and pension. Modernity freed and doomed the young to traverse its many unstable choices.
“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” narrates Europe’s modernization through its young adults. While histories of modern Europe and youth have both focused on Western Europe (and its urban and industrial core), this book reaches from Austria-Hungary toward the rest of the continent. Extended comparisons include the Ottoman Empire, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Nordic countries. Thus, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” explores modernization as a lived experience across social strata and throughout the continent.
Major Publications
- “The Curious Case of the Islamic Journeymen: Questions and Texts toward a Comparative Study of Guilds,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 67, no. 7 (2024): 703-800.
- With John Paul Newman, “Through a Glass Darkly: Introduction to Research Cluster [Suicide, War, and the Military in East-Central Europe, 1918–1945],” Slavic Review 82, no. 3 (2023): 591–594.
- “What is Austro-Hungarian History to the Eurasianist?” Journal of Austrian Studies 56, no. 2 (2023): 21–30.
- “Social Stratification and Job Market Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe,” Journal of Social History 56, no. 2 (2022): 439–62.
- “Judentum, Islam und Russische Revolution: Betrachtungen aus der Sicht vergleichender Geschichtswissenschaft” [Judaism, Islam, and the Russian Revolution: Observations from Comparative History], Arbeit – Bewegung – Geschichte 15, no. 2 (2017): 65–84.
- “Is Adolescence Culturally Transferred? Is it Universal? Why Should the Social Historian Care?” In Cultural Transfer Europe-Serbia: Methodological Issue and Challenges, ed. Slobodan G. Markovich (Belgrade: Faculty of Political Sciences, 2023), 175–86.
- “Female Rule in Imperial Russia: Is Gender a Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” In A Companion to Global Queenship: An Examination of Female Rule and Political Agency in the Premodern World, ed. Elena Woodacre (Bradford: ARC Humanities Press, 2018): 79–94.
“Tolstoy in the Caucasus: Noble Savages and Imperialist Identities,” In Critical Insights: Leo Tolstoy, ed. Rachel Stauffer (Ipswich: Salem Press, 2017): 83–94.