New Affiliated Faculty Member, Jana Hunter

Jana Hunter, Ph.D., will join the Department of History starting in Fall of 2025.

Jana Hunter is a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe, with interests in time, technology, and modernity. She received her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2024. She has held fellowships at Princeton University, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Herder Institute. Her first book project, Living Modernity through Time: Bohemia from Revolution to Republic c. 1848-1918, examines how individuals and communities in Bohemia navigated modernity through shifting experiences of time. Through case studies of rural, industrial, urban, and religious spaces, it explores how temporal frameworks – natural and industrial, religious and secular, mechanical and subjective – shaped daily life, cultural identity, and political claims in this multilingual Habsburg region. Rather than seeing modern time as a totalising force, she shows how Bohemians actively reworked temporal regimes to serve imperial, national, regional, and commercial aims. Her second project, Testing Grounds: From Marx to Oppenheimer—Czechoslovakia’s Global Legacy, 1918 to the Present, builds on this work by tracing how 20th-century ideologies of modernity were lived, imposed, and resisted through the uranium-mining town of Jáchymov. Once dubbed the “cradle of the atomic bomb,” Jáchymov became a testing ground for empires and energy regimes – its landscape transformed by extractive ambition, political violence, and environmental fallout. The project explores how modern states manipulate landscapes and how landscapes remember these scars.

CREEES would like to congratulate Dr. Jana Hunter on her new role and wish her a smooth transition to Stanford!