Robert Austin

University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

Visiting Fellow

Duration of Stay: 11 May-10 June 2022

Robert Austin is based at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, where he is Associate Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES). At CERES, he coordinates the Undergraduate and Graduate European Studies Program, the Hellenic Studies Program and the Hungarian Studies Program. Robert Austin has extensive experience in both collaborating with the media, including CBC and The Economist, as well as in academia, with his most recent book, “Making and Remaking the Balkans: Nations and States since 1878”, appearing with the University of Toronto Press in May 2019. He is now working on a popular history of Central Europe since 1848.

Robert already gave an online talk in 2020 as part of the Research Colloquium, where he discussed Hungary’s authoritarian turn. In person this time, he will give a talk on 16 May at 15:15 in Room VG0.14 (Vielberth Gebäude) at UR, on The Multiple Trajectories of Albanian Transitional Justice - an event organized in collaboration with the Südosteuropa Gesellschaft He will draw on his long-standing expertise on Albania, as in the past he served as a Tirana-based correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In his talk, he will adopt a long-term perspective on 20^th century Albania in considering the fraught and disjointed attempts to create a meaningful reckoning with Albania’s communist past.