James Krapfl

Candidate for Member at Large, 2018


James Krapfl is Associate Professor of modern European history at McGill University in Montreal.  He is the author of Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture, and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992 (Cornell, 2013), which was awarded the George Blazyca Prize for best new monograph on eastern Europe by the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (2015), as well as the Czechoslovak Studies Association Book Prize (also 2015).  Krapfl is a specialist on east central Europe with particular interests in the history of mentalities and political culture, and in the historical anthropology of revolutionary phenomena.  He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, after previously studying at Stanford and the Central European University in Budapest, and he has been an associate of the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague, the Sociological and Historical Institutes of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, and Palacký University in Olomouc.  He is currently wrapping up a multi-year research project on “Democracy and Citizens in Slovakia since 1968,” in collaboration with partners in Bratislava, and with Barbara J. Falk he is co-editing a collection of essays on Václav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” to mark the essay’s fortieth anniversary next year (building off a volume that appeared in Czech last year, edited by Jiří Suk and Kristina Andělová).  Krapfl has previously served on the executive board of the Slovak Studies Association and has been an active member of ASEEES as well as its Canadian and British counterparts.  He would be honored to “give back” to the association through service on the ASEEES Board.