Tara Zahra, the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of East European History and the College and Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, explores how people, ideas, and cultures traverse borders—and how such movements have shaped the modern world. Her scholarship examines subjects including family life, migration, nationalism, internationalism, and globalization. The thread that stitches her work together is how individuals’ everyday experiences intersect with greater sociopolitical conditions.
Zahra is the author of numerous award-winning books, most recently The Great War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe (2026), coauthored with Pieter M. Judson, and Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (2023). Her work has earned wide recognition, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Trained as a dancer, Zahra was recently a visiting fellow at New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts. Her current research explores how movement and dance can serve as sources to research and represent history. In close collaboration with artists, she is uncovering how choreography and embodiment bridge the past, present, and future—inviting us to see the ways in which individual and collective histories are archived and expressed in movement.