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Lawrence Wolff's Teaching and Research Interests

RESEARCH INTERESTS:  My research, over the last twenty years, has focused on East-West issues within Europe, and the problem of how, in the age of Enlightenment, Europe came to be culturally conceived as divided between "Western Europe" and "Eastern Europe." This was the central question of my book “Inventing Eastern Europe” (1994), which focused on the Enlightenment, mental maps, and the relevance of the  idea of “civilization”  for formulating the difference between East and West.  Since then, I have pursued the problem of how the distinction between Eastern Europe and Western Europe was conditioned by the context of empire, as in the case of Dalmatia within the Venetian state, as discussed in my book “Venice and the Slavs” (2001), and now in my current research concerning Galicia within the Habsburg monarchy.  My earlier books concerned Poland and the Vatican in the eighteenth century and child abuse in Freud’s Vienna in the nineteenth century, reflecting my research interests in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Vatican and early modern Rome, the cultural and urban history of Vienna, and the history of childhood.  I have also pursued research in the history of religion in Eastern Europe, the historical significance of travel literature, and the cultural history of geography and anthropology.

TEACHING INTERESTS:  My teaching interests focus on Eastern Europe, Poland, the Habsburg monarchy, and the Enlightenment, with a general emphasis on European cultural and intellectual history.  In 2006-2007 I will teach courses on Eastern Europe, Culture and Communism in Eastern Europe, Mozart’s Vienna, and the History of Poland.

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