Doctoral Project
Post-WWII Coexistence in an East Slovak Small-Town
My project is a microhistorical analysis of coexistence in a linguistically mixed Czechoslovak border region after the end of the Second World War. It focuses on the east Slovak small town of Nižný Medzev, whose inhabitants spoke German, Hungarian, Slovak, or Romani and who, since the end of the Second World War, had to contend with restrictive measures of the Czechoslovak authorities, decreed from above but implemented by local actors on the ground. The case of this town, where a substantial part of the German-speaking population remained throughout the 20th century, enables the analysis of how the fundamental social transformations of postwar Czechoslovakia took place outside the cosmopolitan cities yet in a linguistically heterogeneous area. Based on archival documents, biographical interviews, and contemporary press, this dissertation puts into the forefront the agency of individuals and their role in shaping, restructuring but also stabilizing the intimate society across historical ruptures. The main argument of the project is that in a multilingual environment, categories based on language or nationality did not constitute a determining factor in everyday coexistence, not even during periods of significant social and political change. The dissertation argues that in a remote small town, it was personal relationships within the close-knit community and political affiliation that created divisions or enabled cooperation within the small town. Regarding the timeframe, the project focuses on the period from the end of the Second World War, when the town was hit by waves of forced migration, to the end of the 1960s as a period in which the original inhabitants coped with the influx of Slovak-speaking workers due to the industrialization of the town. The project contributes to the current state of knowledge about the functioning of societies in the periods of postwar reconciliation and political transformation, emphasizing the dynamics of coexistence in small communities in the border regions and underscoring the role of individual actors.
Curriculum Vitae
Tereza Juhászová is a PhD Candidate in History pursuing a joint doctoral degree at the University of Regensburg and Charles University in Prague. In Autumn 2024, she was awarded a one-year scholarship from the Bavarian-Czech Academic Agency, sponsored by the Free State of Bavaria, to complete her doctoral studies at the University of Regensburg.
Tereza graduated from the Balkan, Eurasian, and Central European Studies at Charles University (CU). Since 2020, she has been a lecturer in the modern history of Central and Southeastern Europe at the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences (CU). In 2023 and 2024, Tereza served as the coordinator of the Malach Center for Visual History (CU). In the same period, she was a principal investigator of a research grant awarded by the Grant Agency of Charles University.
Tereza has received funding for internships, research stays, and workshops at UNC-Chapel Hill (USA), Humboldt University, University of Vienna, University of Jyväskylä (Finland), Slovak Academy of Sciences, and Corvinus University in Budapest. In her research, Tereza focuses on the microhistories of Central Europe, emphasizing the national, ethnic, social, and gender dynamics within urban spaces during the second half of the 20th century.
Selected Publications
Juhászová, Tereza. “ʻBien Mantaaknʼ: The Manifestation of Identity in Cemeteries in the Eastern Slovak Town of Medzev,” in East Central European Cemeteries: Ethnic, Linguistic, and Narrative Aspects of Sepulchral Culture and the Commemoration of the Dead in Borderlands, edited by Ferdinand Kühnel, Soňa Mikulová, and Snežana Stanković, 77–106, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2023.
Juhászová, Tereza. “Post-WWII Migration Flows in Micro-perspective: The Case of the East Slovak Small Town Medzev.” Individual and Society | Človek a spoločnosť 25, no. 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.31577/cas.2022.01.598
Juhászová, Tereza. “The Troubled Pasts of Hungarian and German Minorities in Slovakia and Their Representation in Museums.” Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics 12, no. 1 (2018), 52–71. https://doi.org/10.2478/jnmlp-2018-0002
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