Dr. Franziska Davies

Franziska Davies is assistant professor of Eastern and Central Eastern European History at the History Department of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her resarch focuses on the modern history of Ukraine, Poland and Russia. In 2023 she published the edited volume „Ukraine in Europe. Dream and Trauma of a Nation“ and in 2022 she and Katja Makhotina published their book „Eastern Europe’s Open Wounds. Travels to the memorial sites of the Second World“ which was awarded the Bavarian Book Prize in the category „non-fiction“.

During her stay at CAS Franziska will continue working on her book project about the end of the Soviet Union and state socialism in East Central Europe, told from a distinctly Polish and Ukrainian perspective. With a special focus on protest and labour movement in Ukraine and Poland in the 1980s she analyses the distintegration of communism and the end of Moscow’s hegemony in Eastern Central Europe from the perspectives of the so-called „peripheries“ of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Her project shows how important these societies and regions actually were in this period and is hereby a contribution to a decolonial history of Eastern and Eastern Central Europe.