Cristina Florea

Overview

I am a historian of Central and Eastern Europe. My work examines the competition between German and Russian power across this region and its consequences for the people caught in between: the entanglement of nationalism and empire, the long afterlife of imperial rule, and the ways great-power politics shaped — and was shaped by — local societies. I approach the field transnationally without forsaking the local. Small places, closely observed, reveal how global processes were actually lived.

My first book, Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton University Press, 2025), follows one such place across two centuries, as it passed from the Habsburg Empire to Romania, the Soviet Union, and independent Ukraine. Drawing on archives and published sources in six languages, the book traces how successive regimes sought to remake the region in their own image, and how Bukovinans — rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans; urban German-speaking Jews and Poles — navigated constant reconfiguration and reinvention. A borderland that never fit its maps comfortably, Bukovina emerges as an early testing ground for state-building projects that eventually extended across Europe. Its transformations ran at different tempos, layering the region into a historical palimpsest and leaving its people with the sense of having lived many lives.

I am now writing a history of Vienna under four-power occupation, 1945–1955: one city, four armies, ten years in which the postwar order was improvised on the ground. The city of The Third Man was the Cold War's opening act: a place where occupiers, survivors, returning exiles, and displaced persons from across Eastern Europe negotiated the end of one war and the beginning of another, and where the division of Europe was rehearsed and contested until 1955, when the four powers, defying every expectation, simply left. Told from the street up rather than the conference table down, the book draws on archives in Austria, Britain, United States, and France. 

I teach courses on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, World War II and interwar Europe, the Cold War, Vienna and the birth of the modern, and the history of borders and borderlands.

Research Focus

• Central and Eastern Europe; Habsburg Empire and successor states
• Soviet Union
• Cold War
• Empires and Nationalisms
• Jewish History and the Holocaust
• Global, Comparative, and Transnational
• Cultural and Intellectual History

Overview

Cristina Florea is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Cornell University, researching and teaching the histories of Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on borderlands, imperial entanglements and competition, and the interplay of nationalisms and empires in the region. She is the author of Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton University Press, 2025), which traces the making and remaking of a disputed borderland, now straddling the frontier between Romania and Ukraine, across two centuries of imperial and national rule. Combining a local, microhistorical lens with a sensitivity to global context, the book shows how remote, seemingly peripheral places have shaped the development of modern statehood and sovereignty. She is currently writing a history of Vienna under four-power occupation, 1945–1955, told from the street up — a study of how occupiers, survivors, and displaced persons from across Eastern Europe negotiated the end of one war and the beginning of another. Florea's interests also include mass emigration and displacement in Eurasia, challenges to democracy, the workings of authoritarianism, and the rise of extremist politics on both the right and the left in interwar Europe.