Historian Chad Bryant will share a fascinating story of Egon Erwin Kisch whose literary experimentations suggested ways of thinking about strangers and difference, place and community, in the fin-de-siècle Prague more broadly.
Egon Erwin Kisch (1885-1948), a celebrated member of the Prague Circle, first earned local fame while writing a newspaper column entitled Prager Streifzüge, or Prague Forays, published weekly from 1910 to 1911. In these literal and figurative forays, Kisch puzzled through notions of urban belonging in a city ruled by Czech elites and shot through with political antisemitism.
Free and open to the public. Suggested donation $10. Seats are limited, on first-come, first-served basis. RSVP through Eventbrite.
About
CHAD BRYANT is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Global Studies. He is the author of the recently published Prague: Belonging and the Modern City (Harvard University Press, 2021). The book has been positively reviewed in the Economist and Times Literary Supplement and is co-winner of the Radomír Luža Prize. A Czech translation, published by Argo, is forthcoming.
Bryant is also author of Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2007), winner of the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize. He co-edited, with Arthur Burns and Paul Readman, Walking Histories, 1800-1914 (Palgrave, 2016) and, with Paul Readman and Cynthia Radding, Borderlands in World History, 1700-1914 (Palgrave, 2014). Bryant, Kateřina Čapková, and Diana Dumitru are completing a study of Communist party dynamics and the Slánský show trial in Czechoslovakia that will be published by Oxford University Press. This project has been funded by an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship.
The event is organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews with support of the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association and the Leo Baeck Institute.