Jana Hunter
Jana Hunter is a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe, with interests in time, science and technology, modernity, and environmental change.
Her first book project, Living Modernity through Time: Bohemia from Revolution to Republic, 1848-1918, uses time as a lens to rethink the making of modern Central Europe and its place in European history. Rather than treating modern time as a single, accelerating rhythm, the study reveals the coexistence of natural and industrial, religious and secular, nationalist and imperial, mechanical and subjective temporalities that structured everyday life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bohemia. It shows how time became a medium through which individuals and communities shaped political visions, claimed cultural identities, and navigated the pressures of empire and nation-building. Moving from rural villages and mining towns to Prague’s municipal councils and the Reichsrat, it reconstructs how local actors reworked temporal regimes to serve imperial, national, regional, and commercial aims, and in so doing offers a new framework for understanding modernization beyond the categories of nation and empire.
Her second project, Testing Grounds: From Marx to Oppenheimer-Czechoslovakia’s Global Legacy, 1918-Present, traces how twentieth-century ideologies of modernity were lived, imposed, and resisted through the uranium-mining town of Jáchymov. Once dubbed the “cradle of the atomic bomb,” Jáchymov became a testing ground for successive empires and energy regimes, its landscape transformed by extractive ambition, political violence, and environmental fallout. At its core the project asks how time – geological, political, and technological – structured modernity. Each regime sought to accelerate it: extracting energy from deep geological pasts, harnessing technology to drive the present, and projecting ideological futures through resource control. Bringing Karl Marx’s ecological critique into dialogue with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s nuclear physics, Testing Grounds reframes the history of militarized landscapes and energy transitions, revealing modernity not as linear progress but as a series of ruptures and recalibrations, and situating East-Central Europe within global histories of extraction and environmental change.
Hunter received her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2024. She has held fellowships at Princeton University, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Herder Institute. Before joining Stanford, she was a Lecturer in Modern European History at New College, University of Oxford.
