Professor James Mark

Overview

Much of my recent work has concerned the development of modern Eastern Europe in the context of the global transformations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A monograph, 1989. A Global History of Eastern Europe, written with my colleagues Bogdan Iacob, Tobias Rupprecht and Ljubica Spaskovska, was published for the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, and selected as one of best books of 2019 by Europe Now.  The co-authored Socialism Goes Global. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (OUP, 2022), and co-edited Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World (Indiana University Press, 2020) both sought the relationship between Eastern Europe and global histories of imperialism and anti-imperialism. How does the region’s experience of decolonisation, nation building, re-occupation, violence and liberation fit within a global history of Empire - across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first centuries? And how does ‘going global’ help us understand contemporary phenomenon such as Russia’s war on Ukraine or the rise of populism? A co-edited collection entitled Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the global history of race for Manchester University Press sought to use history to help make sense of the much more explicit presence of race in the region's contemporary politics and culture.  

I have had a long-term interest in the history of memory: the ways in which societies have sought to make sense of and ‘use’ their pasts. The Unfinished Revolution. Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (Yale, 2010), which was selected as one of the ‘Best Books of 2011’ by US journal Foreign Affairs and shortlisted for the Longman History Today Book Prize,  questioned how post-Communist societies have made sense the legacies of Communism in politics, museums, law, archaeology, activism and through oral history. The global crisis in memory: populism, decolonisation and how we remember in the twenty-first century (LUP, 2020) addresses contemporary populist and decolonial challenges to liberal cosmopolitan memory across the world. More recently, I co-edited a collection exploring alternative criminalization paradigms since 1945: Not Nuremberg—Histories of Alternative Criminalization Paradigms, 1945–2021 (2025).

Much of my initial historical research was shaped by the opening up after Communism – and the opportunities to undertake archival and oral history that it offered. It has explored the cultural and societal forces that underpinned the establishment of Communist states and contributing to their dissolution. I have published extensively, on themes such as activism, anti-imperialism, the Red Army and sexual violence, secret agents, travel writing, the idea of generation, representations of the West and the 'anti-imperialist world', middle-class experiences of Communism, Europeanisation, rights, racism/ anti-racism, and the system's demise. I was a co-investigator on an international project on pan-European activism, internationalism and Europeanisation in the 1960s and 1970s which sought to incorporate eastern European activism into a continental account, resulting in the co-authored work Europe's 1968: Voices of Revolt (OUP, 2013).

Over the last decade, I have been Principal Investigator on three international funded projects:

i.                Leverhulme Research Leadership Award : '1989 after 1989: Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism in Global Perspective'. This has brought a team of four research fellows, and two PhD students, to Exeter. Together we have undertaken a range of projects which aim to place the end of state socialism in both longer-term and global contexts, connecting this major historical transformation to broader political, economic and cultural processes of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

ii.               Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded project, in collaboration with six other institutions and ten colleagues: 'Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections Between the 'Second' and 'Third Worlds''. This explores the political, economic and cultural encounter between eastern Europe and the decolonising world from 1945. See our 'Tito in Africa' exhibition: https://www.muzej-jugoslavije.org/en/exhibition/tito-u-africi-slike-solidarnosti/ . For an interview in Romanian on the project.

iii.            The third is an AHRC-Labex funded Franco-British project, Criminalization of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global Perspective. This project analyses the criminalisation of dictatorial pasts in Europe and Latin America since 1945. It considers how practices of judicial reckoning and historical narratives are produced across multiple professions, networks and spaces; and way they ideas and practices of dealing with the past have traveled across and between regions, and on a global scale.

Recent Publications

A collectively researched and written monograph, Socialism Goes Global. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Excerpt here. A dicussion of the themes together with Steffi Marung and Péter Apor; another book discussion on Eastern Europe, Empire, migration and race with Paul Betts.

A monograph, 1989. A Global History of Eastern Europe, written with my colleagues Bogdan Iacob, Tobias Rupprecht and Ljubica Spaskovska to co-incide with the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 revolutions, was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2019. There are reviews here here here here here here and here .

We discuss some arguments from the book in the journal Eurozine in The Struggle Over 1989. For interviews about the book in English, English, English, English, English, Lithuanian, Lithuanian, Czech and Czech. It is discussed on this radio show.

Artemy Kalinovsky, Steffi Marung and I have co-edited a collection for Indiana University Press on the way in which socialism connected the world: Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020)

There are reviews here, here, here, and here.

The co-edited collection Off White: Central and Eastern Europe and the global history of race was published by Manchester University Press in 2024. Anikó Imre and I discuss the book here. It is reviewed here, here, here , here.

Research supervision:

I am keen to supervise on, and can offer expertise in, a number of areas:

1. modern europe, especially in global contexts
2. histories of socialism
3. social and cultural histories of activism 
4. histories of race, especially concerning eastern Europe
5. eastern European history in decolonial and global contexts
6. the social, cultural and political history of modern Central/ Eastern Europe.
7. Communism and post-Communism in Central/ Eastern Europe
8. memory studies in general, and in particular under Communism/ post-Communism
9. the global rise of populism, particularly as it relates to culture and memory
10. oral history

Biography:

I completed my BA in History, M.Phil. in Russian and East European Studies and a D.Phil. in History at the University of Oxford. I have worked in the History Department at Exeter since 2004.