Victoria Harms specializes in post-1945 European history and transatlantic Cold War studies. Her research and teaching interests focus on intellectual, social, political, and cultural history.

At Hopkins, she has worked closely with the Center for Social Concern and has partnered up with the Reginald F. Lewis Museum for African-American History and Culture in Maryland and Graceland Park/ O’Donnell Heights elementary/ middle school to add a community engaged component to her AS.100.497 seminar. In the fall of 2019, this class included a visit to the RFL museum with our middle school partner and a public roundtable on “Baltimore 1968: Memories and Legacies." Funding comes from the CSC and the Billie Holiday Center for the Liberation of Arts.

Together with the Modern Languages and Literatures Department, the Max Kade Center of German Thought, and the student organization European Horizons, Victoria invited a public speaker and anti-racism activist by the name of Ali Çan to Homewood campus to discuss his work in 2019. Funding came from our partners (GROLL, Max Kade, and European Horizons) and the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany.

From 2015 to 2018, Victoria was a post-doctoral fellow at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg, Germany. She graduated with a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015 and holds a Masters degree from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and a Bachelor degree from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. Apart from Hopkins, she has taught European and U.S. history at the University of Pittsburgh and the Justus Liebig University in Gießen, Germany. Her book manuscript “Destined or Doomed? Hungarian Dissidents and their Western Friends, 1973-1998,” deals with the history of opposition to state socialism and the Cold War order on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Victoria has specialized in the history of opposition to state socialism in Eastern Europe from the 1970s until 1989 and its legacies. She is particularly interested in the history of ideas and networks of like-minded intellectuals in East and West.

Of late, she has come to work on the “long 1960s” and the influence of 1968 on protest movements and dissent in Europe, European politics and on memory politics.

Additionally, Victoria is interested in sports history and is preparing a publication on the West German position regarding the boycott of the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980.

Her major research project “Craving Oil” deals with the role of natural resources in German imperial projects on the European continent.

“1968 – A European Year,” winter 2017-2018, Justus-Liebig-University Gießen.

“The Cold War as Sports History,” summer 2017, Justus-Liebig-University Gießen.

“Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte Ungarns im 20. Jahrhundert,“ co-teaching with Professor Dr. Peter Haslinger, summer 2016, Justus-Liebig-University Gießen.

“Western Civilization II,” spring 2015, University of Pittsburgh.

Undergraduate Courses

AS.100.233 The History of Modern Germany

AS.100.270 Europe since 1945

AS.100.386 The Cold War as Sports History

AS.100.497 The Year 1968: Rebels, Revolutions, and the Right-Wing Backlash

“’68 on the Historians’ Mind: Eric Hobsbawm and Tony Judt,” in Unsettled 1968: Origins, Myths, Impact, ed. by Anna, Michał Przeperski, and Aleksandra Konarzewska. Routledge, 2019.

Radio Interview, “Solidarität mit der Central European University,” Radio Unerhört, Marburg, 13 April 2017. https://www.freie-radios.net/82522.

“Open Society v. Illiberal State: Europe, Hungary, and the ‘Lex CEU’,” in Lex CEU and the state of the open society 25 years after the democratic revolutions, ed. by Eva-Clarita Pettai, Cultures of History Forum, Kertész Kolleg Jena, published September 12, 2017.

“A Tale of Two Revolutions: Hungary’s 1956 and the Undoing of 1989,” in East European Politics, Societies and Cultures 31 no 1, special issue: “The Genealogies of Memory,” ed. by Joanna Wawrzyniak and Ferenc Laczó (August 2017). (peer-reviewed)

“Central Europe in Manhattan: Why Hungarian Dissidents Mattered to New York Intellectuals,” Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 25, no. 1 (2015): 23-38.

“Living Mitteleuropa in the 1980s: A network of Hungarian and West German Intellectuals,” in Ilse Lazaroms and Emily Gioielli (eds.), The Politics of Contested Narratives. Biographical Approaches to Modern European History. London, New York: Routledge, 2014.