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Istvan
Deak Istvan
Deak, who is Seth Low Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, was
born
in 1926 in Hungary and began his university studies there. Following
his
departure from Hungary in 1948, he studied history at the Sorbonne in
Paris and
worked as a journalist and librarian in both France and Germany. Since
1956, he
has been residing in New York City where he studied modern European
history at
Columbia University. He obtained his
PhD degree in 1964 and has been teaching at Columbia University, with
some
brief intermissions, ever since. He was
the Director of the University's Institute on East Central Europe
between 1968
and 1979. Professor
Deak's teaching and research interests are mainly in the history of
Central and East Central Europe. His publications include, Weimar Germany's
Left-wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the "Weltbuhne" and
Its Circle (The University of California Press, 1968); The Lawful Revolution:
Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848-1849 (Columbia
University Press, 1979),
for which he received the Lionel Trilling Book Award of Columbia
College, and
which also appeared in German and Hungarian, as well as Beyond Nationalism: A
Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918
(Oxford
University Press, 1990), which
received, among other things, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize of the
American
Association for the Advancement of Slavic
Studies, and which also appeared in German,
Hungarian, and Italian. His most recent
publication is Essays on
Hitler's Europe (University
of Nebraska Press, 2001), which appeared also in Hungarian. He edited
and
partly wrote, together with Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, The Politics of
Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton
University
Press, 2000). Istvan
Deak has published articles in US, British, Hungarian, Austrian, etc.,
books and journals on such subjects as Hungarian historiography, the
cultural
and political scene in Weimar Germany, the revolutions of 1848, World
War I in
Central Europe, the rise of fascism, collaboration and resistance in
Europe
during World War II, and post-World War II judicial retributions. He is
a
frequent contributor to The New York
Review of Books and The New
Republic. Deak's
current research project is on collaboration, resistance, and
retribution in
World War II Europe. In
1990, Istvan Deak was elected into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
and in the course of his career, he received, among other things, the
John S.
Guggenheim fellowship and was invited as a fellow to the Institute for
Advanced
Study at Princeton, N.J., the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington,
D.C., and
the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria. In 1999, he
received the
George Washington Award of the American Hungarian Foundation. Since his retirement in 1997 Istvan Deak has been teaching at Columbia University as a special lecturer. In the spring of 1999 and in the fall of 2002 he was visiting professor at Stanford University. His wife, Gloria, is an art historian, and his daughter, Eva, who is married, is an events manager in San Francisco. |
