Academic Career

As an undergraduate studying modern languages at the University of Nottingham, I travelled widely throughout ex-Yugoslavia and became interested in the history, politics, and culture of this part of the world. I graduated with a first class honours degree in 2004 and went directly into the PhD programme at the University of Southampton. At the end of 2008, I completed my doctoral dissertation - on the transition of the Croat lands out of Austria-Hungary and into Yugoslavia at the end of the First World War – supervised by Professor Mark Cornwall. My PhD won a prize, ‘Best Doctoral Dissertation in Balkan/Ottoman Studies’ at the Annual European Conference of the Association for Nationalities Studies at Science Po, in 2008. The same year, I joined the Centre for War Studies at University College Dublin working with Professors Robert Gerwarth and John Horne on an IRCHSS and ERC funded project researching paramilitary violence in the years after the First World War. I started lecturing at Maynooth in 2011.

Research Interests

My principal research interests at the moment lie in the cultural history of Yugoslavia and of the Balkan region more generally. I am currently preparing a monographic study of the wartime generation in interwar Yugoslavia, provisionally titled Embattled Kingdom: The South Slav Wartime Generation and the Breaking of Yugoslavia 1918-1945. The work will focus on the veterans of the First World War and explores constructions of masculinity, post-war violence and its absorption into parliamentary politics, and the interwar trajectory of Yugoslavia (from parliamentary democracy, to royal dictatorship, and finally civil war). I am also interested more broadly in the Balkan region in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and I have researched and published on paramilitary violence in the Balkans after 1917, the transition of the Croat lands from a Habsburg to a Yugoslav framework, and the successes and failures of institution-building in interwar Eastern Europe.

Publications

Monograph

Embattled Kingdom: The South Slav Wartime Generation and the Breaking of Yugoslavia 1914-1945 (forthcoming).

Edited Volumes/Journal Special Editions

Editor (with Julia Eichenberg), The First World War and Veterans’ Internationalism (under consideration at Palgrave Macmillan).

Editor (with Mark Cornwall) Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Great War in East-Central Europe (Berghahn, forthcoming, 2012,).

Guest editor (with Julia Eichenberg), ‘Aftershocks: Paramilitary Violence after World War One’, special edition of Contemporary European History, 19/3 (August 2010).

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

‘The Spirit of Revolution and the Shades of Empire: Serbian and Habsburg Military Institutional Legacies in Yugoslavia after 1918’, Nationalities Papers, 40/1 (January 2012).

‘War in the Balkans 1914-1918’ (review article), War in History, 18/3 (July 2011).

‘Serbian Integral Nationalism and Mass Violence in the Balkans 1903-1945’, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 124 (2011).

‘Post-Imperial and Post-War Violence in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes 1917-1923’, Contemporary European History, 19/3 (August 2010).

‘Introduction: Aftershocks: Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War’ (co-authored with Julia Eichenberg), Contemporary European History, 19/3 (August 2010).

Book Chapters

‘Serbian Veterans and the Allied Victory’, in The First World War and Veterans’ Internationalism (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan).

‘Les soldats, des Habsbourg à Karageorgevich’, in Remy Cazals (ed.), Les Identités Sociales et Nationales en Guerre (forthcoming, 2012).

‘Framing the Great War: The Origins, Attributes, and Legacies of Paramilitary Violence in the Balkans’ in Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (eds.), The Limits of Demobilization: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (forthcoming, Oxford University Press: 2012).

‘Silent Liquidation? Croatian Veterans and the Margins of War Memory in Interwar Yugoslavia’ in Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Great War in East-Central Europe (John Paul Newman, Mark Cornwall, eds.), (forthcoming, Berg: 2012).

‘Forging a United Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes: The Legacy of the First World War and the ‘Invalid Question’, in Yugoslavia: Key Issues and Controversies (Dejan Djokić and James Ker-Lindsay) (Routledge: 2010).

Reviews

Dejan Djokić, 'Pašić and Trumbić: The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes’, Slavonic and East European Review (forthcoming).

Robert Pyrah, Marius Turda (eds.), ‘Re-contextualizaing East Central European History: Nation, Culture, and Minority Groups’, in Modern Language Review 106/4 (October 2011).

Robert Donia, ‘Sarajevo: A Biography’, Slavonic and East European Review, 88/4 (October 2010).

Maria Bucur, ‘Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 33/5 (September-October 2010).

Jonathan Gumz, ‘The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia’, History: Journal of the Historical Society, University of Exeter, 95/320 (October 2010).

Dejan Djokić, ‘Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia’, Slavonic and East European Review 88/3, (July 2010).

Marko Attila Hoare, ‘The History of Bosnia From the Middle Ages to the Present Day’, Nationalities Papers, vol. 37/3 (May 2009).

Andrej Mitrović, ‘Serbia’s Great War 1914-1918’, for online forum Balkan Academic News, available at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/balkans/message/8252

Celia Hawkesworth, ‘Zagreb, a Cultural and Literary History’, Central Europe, volume 6/1 (May 2008)

Other Articles/Publications

‘Through Snow and Red Fog: South Slav Soldiers in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond’, article in Irish Slavonic Studies, 23 (2011).

Papers Delivered

November 2010 – ‘From Habsburg to Karađorđević: Croatian soldiers and post-war transition 1918-1929’, colloque international à Laon et Craonne, ‘Les Identitès Sociales et Nationales en Guerre’.

September 2010 – ‘Times of Death: The Great War and Serbia’s Twentieth Century’, conference ‘Aftermaths: Legacies and Memories of War in Europe, 1918-1945-1989’, University of Birmingham.

March 2010 – ‘Serbian Veterans in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’, Annual Convention of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies, Fitzwilliam College. Cambridge.

November 2009 – ‘Opposing Liberation and Unification: Cultures of Defeat in the Balkans’, conference ‘The Defeat of the Central Powers: Experiences and Legacies of 1918’, University College Dublin.

October 2009 – ‘Serbian veterans and the inter-Allied Culture of Victory in interwar Yugoslavia’, at ‘Inter-Allied Veterans, Internationalism, and Cultures of Victory’, Trinity College Dublin.

September 2009 – ‘Coercion and Consensus in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes 1918-1912’. ‘Understanding Regime Change: Control of the Security Apparatus’, workshop at the University of Utrecht.

December 2008 –‘Paramilitary Violence in the Balkans’, conference ‘Paramilitary Violence after the Great War 1918-1923: Towards a Global Perspective’, conference at University College Dublin.

July 2008 – ‘The Development of the Radical Right in Croatia., at the Association for Nationalities Studies annual conference, at Science Po, Paris.

September 2007 – ‘Second Class Soldiers? Croatian Veterans in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.’, at ‘Sacrifice and Regeneration: the Legacy of the Great War in Interwar Eastern Europe’, international conference at the University of Southampton.

Teaching

Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Europe after 1945

The Birth and Death of Yugoslavia 1918-2003
 

Contact Details

Phone:
+353-1-708 3664
Fax:
+353-1-708 3314
Address:
Department of History, Rhetoric House, South Campus, NUI Maynooth
 

Contact Dr. John Paul Newman