Thesis

A master’s thesis is the capstone of the European History, Politics, and Society program. In researching and writing the thesis, students bring the knowledge and skills they have gained through their classes to bear on a topic of their choice. The thesis is both “broad,” in the sense that all of your studies are in the background, supporting your work, and “concentrated,” as an intensive, extended analysis of a single topic. You should start thinking about possible topics, and building relationships with potential faculty advisors, early in the program. The journey from your initial plans to a polished thesis is an important part of your studies.


Procedure

The thesis is based on original research and is supervised by a faculty advisor. Students begin identifying topics (and approaching potential advisors) through the MA colloquium. In the spring semester of the colloquium, students prepare a prospectus that sets out the thesis topic and argument and outlines a plan for research. Students usually conduct thesis research during the summer and write the thesis in the following fall semester.

The process, from identifying a topic to submitting the final version of the thesis, is explained in the Thesis Guidelines.

2021-2022 Deadlines

To submit the prospectus, Thesis Registration Form, and MA Checklist (to confirm degree progress):

  • September 17, 2021 to register to write in the Fall 2021 term
  • January 21, 2022 to register to write in the Spring 2022 term
  • May 6, 2022 to register to write in the Summer 2022 term


For your advisor to submit the Thesis Evaluation Form and for you to deliver paper and electronic copies to the European Institute: 

  • October 6, 2021 for October 2021 graduation
  • January 26, 2022 for February 2022 graduation
  • May 4, 2022 for May 2022 graduation

Thesis Grants

The Institute provides competitive grants to students who want to conduct thesis research in Europe during either winter, spring, or summer breaks.

Please view the Thesis Grants page for more information.


European History, Society and Politics Theses

Past theses are available to read at the European Institute office.

Featured Video

Ben Diehl (MA, 2020) presents his thesis research at the fourth annual Columbia GSAS Master's SynThesis Competition: The SPD and the Personalization of Politics in Leipzig, 1903-1913.

For more videos featuring MA students and alumni, please view this YouTube playlist.

Recent Theses

Michael Chrzanowski
Heralds of the Terror: the Journalist-Legislators of the French Revolution, 1793 - Awarded with program distinction
Advisor: Charly Colemann

Nick Cohen
Krzysztof Skubiszewski and the Making of Contemporary Polish Foreign Policy: The Legal Universalist Roots of Polish-Ukrainian Relations, 1990-1993
Advisor: Tsveta Petrova

Solal del Castillo
Practicality and Sensitivity in 18th Century Economic Thought: A reading of Rousseau, Hume, and Montesquieu
Advisor: Pierre Force

Adam Frick
Labour & Labor: Reframing the Party-Union Relationship Leading to the Winter of Discontent
Advisor: Luca Falciola

Matteo Giordano
Mediterraneità: Luigi Federzoni and Fascist Italy’s visions of world order and political space (1928-1938)
Advisor: Victoria de Grazia

Matthew Hall
Memory Politics in Orbán’s Hungary
Advisors: Paula Ganga

Luke Jandrain
"A Daily Memorandum": Huguenots in English Political Rhetoric after the Glorious Revolution
Advisor: Christopher Brown

Bennett Kauffman
Missed Warnings, Unheeded Advice: How Bismarck and Moltke’s Successors Ignored the Advice of the Founding Generation and Led Germany Towards War
Advisor: Volker Berghahn

Christian Neubacher
Is there Global Power in a Union? An Analysis of the Relationship between the AFL-CIO and ETUC
Advisor: Seamus O'Cleireacain

David Stolwijk
After the Vote: Why the Netherlands Accepted the Lisbon Treaty, Despite the ‘Nee’ Against the European Constitutional Treaty - Awarded with program distinction
Advisor: Carlo Invernizzi Accetti

Parker Yagman
Assessing the Efficacy of the European Union's Rule of Law Toolbox
Advisor: Sheri Berman

Lauren Ashley Bradford
Occupation Relations: How American Relief Policies and Post-War Strategies Impacted Jewish DPs, Berlin 1945-48
Advisor: Volker Berghahn

Ali Cain
State of Pandemic: Opportunity or Challenge to Far-Right Populist Parties? The Case of the Alternative für Deutschland Party
Advisor: Paula Ganga

Ethan Cohen
“What are we doing in Morocco?” Relocating Spanish History - Awarded with program distinction
Advisor: Ana Fernández-Cebrián

Ayana Dootalieva
On European Identity: Values, Citizenship, and the Idea of Europe
Advisor: Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti

Faïz El Mamoune
When 27 Become 1: A Single European Union Seat at United Nations Security Council or the Triple Trouble of A So-Called Good Idea
Advisor: Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti

Max Ferrer
Touring Imperial Catalonia: Consuming Nostalgia, Constructing Identity - Awarded with program distinction
Advisors: Lisa Tiersten & Victoria de Grazia

Huiyi Gu
The Metamorphosis of Individuality: On Self-Overcoming and Becoming of Overman
Advisor: Oliver Simons

Kristjan Gudmundsson
Occupy Denmark, 2011–2013
Advisor: Sheri Berman

Ruiqi Ji
The Economic and Social Impacts of EU Accession Immigrants in the UK
Advisor: Seamus O'Cleireacain

Yuri Kazakov
Dream Diplomacy: B.A. Bakhmeteff, V.A. Maklakov, and White Émigré Influence on Franco-Soviet Interwar Relations
Advisor: Catherine Evtuhov

John Melkon
The Geopolitical Dilemma of Migration to Europe?
Advisor: Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti

William Naylor
Decentralization and Populism: How Podemos’ Appeal to Regionalism Defined its Political Rise
Advisors: Pablo Bustinduy & Carlo Invernizzi Accetti

Claire Olmstead
Red and Blue and Read All Over: How the Newspapers ‘Mujeres Libres’ and ‘Y’ mobilized their readers during the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
Advisor: Victoria de Grazia

Jade Quintero
Aquarium and Kino: Rock and Roll in the Soviet Union After 1985
Advisors: Daria Ezerova & Tsveta Petrova

Floris Rijssenbeek
A Nascent Democratic Generation: On the Role of Young Hungarians in Defending Democracy
Advisor: Tsveta Petrova

Kristofer Seibt
"My Heart Bled": Sustained Destruction and the Economics of Coercion in German Cameroon
Advisor:  Volker Berghahn

Laura Sussman
How the EU’s ETS can be impacted by a single country using Poland as a case study
Advisor: Tom Moerenhout

Ruben Tjon-A-Meeuw
The Role of Politics in Germany’s Support for the Gas Pipeline and its Implications for Energy Security in Central and Eastern Europe
Advisor: Peter Clement

Oleksandr Yusupov
The Russo-Ukrainian War: Causes, Proposed Solutions, Changing Circumstances, and a Way Out
Advisor: Valerii Kuchynskyi

Andrew Carroll
The NATO Multilateral Force: Driver of Nonproliferation and Limiting Integration in European Security
Advisor: Valerii Kuchynskyi

Corey Cherrington
Reinventing the Ancients, Creating a Religion: Joseph Smith in the Transnational World of Early Archaeology
Advisor: Konstantina Zanou

Ben Diehl
The SPD and the Personalization of Politics in Leipzig, 1903-1913
Advisor: Volker Berghahn

Ian Donnellan
Discipline and Death: The Training of the 12th SS Hitler Youth Panzer Division
Advisor: Adam Tooze

Marc Dorpema
The 1970s as Transition: Recasting the Relance Européenne 
Advisor: Adam Tooze

Joseph Elmo
Images of Identity: Spanish Anarchists Defined Through Spanish Civil War Posters
Advisor: Thai Jones

Emma Flaherty
A Question of Favoritism? Sentiment Trends in RT’s Reporting on Central and Eastern European (CEE) Countries
Advisors: Tsveta Petrova & Thomas Kent

Emily Healy
The Pedagogy of National Identity: Teaching Towards Colonialism
Advisor: Elizabeth Leake

Arnor Gunnarsson
“Some Good News from Greece”: Philhellenism in Denmark
Advisor: Konstantina Zanou

Gabrielle Higgins
A ‘National Socialist Itinerary:’ Nazi Party Interference in British Travel Experiences
Advisor: Adam Tooze

Anna Koolstra
In Defense of the Spitzenkandidaten
Advisor: Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti

Tuure-Eerik Niemi
Sovereign Europe? Analysing EU Member States' Voting Positions in the United Nations General Assembly
Advisor: Tsveta Petrova

Quinn Shepherd
The Spiritual Elite: German Influences on French Nonconformism, 1929-1934 - Awarded with program distinction
Advisor: Mark Lilla

Edoardo Vaccari
Rethinking Socialism, Rebuilding Empire: A Political Portrait of Ignazio Silone (1941-1953)
Advisor: Mark Lilla

Charlotte Waldraff
Währungspolitik ist Auẞenpolitik’: Deutschmark Internationalization in the Times of Helmut Schmidt - Awarded with program distinction
Advisor: Adam Tooze

Ben Walsh
Survey of Bavarian Distinctiveness
Advisor: Sheri Berman

Jie Zhu
The EUEOM's Low Electoral Standard in 2017 Kenyan Presidential Election
Advisor: Tsveta Petrova

Mitul Arora
Hungarian Economic Shift towards the Nazi Sphere of Influence during the Interwar Period
Advisor Tsveta Petrova

Ryan Conley
Diffusing Global Medical Knowledge in Ukraine: A Study of the Changing Practices and Policies to Treat PTSD Among Soldiers and Veterans Post-2014
Advisor Elise Giuliano

Ahmet Goksun
Muslims and Christians in 18th Century Crete: Enigma of a Society Divided by Self-Interest
Advisor Tsveta Petrova

Marisa Henderson
Black Politics and the Press: Paris-Dakar and Black Representation in 1930s Senegal
Advisor Natasha Lightfoot

Angela Kun-Gazda
Conflict and Popular Medicine Reflected in Witchcraft Trials in a Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Town
Advisor Pamela Smith

Kevin Lavery
Youth, Internationalism, and Ideological Accommodation in the Age of the Popular Front: The World Youth Congress Movement, 1936-1939
Advisor Susan Pedersen

Joseph Puchner
Amid the Stormy Scenes of Civil Commotion: Liberties and Liberalism in Post-Napoleonic Iberia, According to the Third Earl of Carnarvon
Advisor Konstantina Zanou

Tristan Sechrest
The Romantic Manager: Alfred Hugenberg in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1924
Advisor Adam Tooze

Robin Stark
The Russian Speaking Nation: Indications of the Political Attitudes of Latvia’s Russian Speaking Ethnic Population
Advisor Elise Giuliano

Tiffany Thompson
International Socialist Playgirl of the Year: Bernadette Devlin Between Student Rebellion and Parliamentary Politics in Northern Ireland, 1968-1974
Advisor Victoria de Grazia

Harry Whomersley
Going Forth and Multiplying: Empire, Citizenship and the Anglosphere in ‘The Penny Magazine,’ 1832-1845
Advisors Deborah Valenze & Emily Jones

Brandon Allen
Thesis: A Victorian Experiment: the Social History of Amnesty International in Britain, 1962-1967
Advisor Tarik Amar

Melissa Bosem
Thesis: At the Feet of Giants: Monumental Remains and the Construction of National Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine
Advisor Tarik Amar

Daniel Castro
Thesis A Year of Incessant Controversy? British Policy Toward Franco's Spain in 1943
Advisor Emily Jones

Jerry Christodoulatos
Thesis Dictators and Don Juans: Reconsidering Greek Mass Tourism through Film, 1967-1974
Advisor Dimitrios Antoniou

Joseph Dammann
Thesis: Russian State Media in the 2017 French Presidential Election
Advisor Elise Giuliano

Andrew Dornstadter
Thesis Tests of NATO Allies' Commitment and Performance: Lessons from Poland and Slovakia since the London Summit "Hand of Friendship"
Advisor Tsveta Petrova

Ryan Eavenson
Thesis: The Romanian Association for Strengthening Relations with the Soviet Union (ARLUS), Literature, and Soviet Soft Power in Romania, 1944-1964
Advisor Victoria Phillips

Nicholas Fiore
Thesis The United Kingdom Independence Party: Crafting a "Winning Formula" or a Typical Party of the European Radical Right?
Advisor Sheri Berman

Meyer Horne
Thesis: Impossible Hope: Riots, Resistance, and Resilience in France, the United Kingdom and the United States
Advisor Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Jake Palmer
Thesis The Boundaries of Democracies: A Normative Case for Porous Borders
Advisor Turkuler Isiksel

Sarah Roth
Thesis Operation Focus: The Controversial Role of Print Propaganda in the Lead-Up to the 1956 Hungarian Uprising
Advisor Victoria Phillips

Kaitlin Shine
Thesis L'Uomo Frainteso della Grande Guerra
Advisor Volker Berghahn

Stephanie Sonkin
Thesis Origins of Sweden's Public Diplomacy Overhaul, 2003-2007
Advisor Tsveta Petrova

 

Alvaro Miranda
Thesis The Pan, the Bolshevik, and the International of Good People: Revolution and Identity in Isaac Babel’s Red Calvary
Advisor Tsveta Petrova

Holly M. Porino
Thesis The Great Imperial Plants of Zola’s La Curee
Advisor Elizabeth Leake

Elizabeth Kim
Thesis Trade for Good: The Impact of the EU-Egypt Free Trade Agreement on Egyptian Labor Rights, 2004-2011
Advisor Tsveta Petrova

Alexandro Pedraza
Thesis Power, Violence, and Opportunity: The Recruitment of Indigenous Soldiers in 1920s Spanish Morocco
Advisor Lisa Tiersten

Renee Pappous
Thesis “Learning to Obey The Rules for the Sake of Society”: Public Identity and Identity Formation at Constantinople Woman’s College, 1914 – 1950
Advisor Dimitrious Antoniou

Jackson Allison
Thesis Rethinking the Labor Process in Britain: Deskilling and Managerial Control, 1930-1050
Advisor Adam Tooze

Farrah Madanay
Thesis West German Physicians and the Legacy of Nazi Medicine, 1968-1989
Advisor Deborah Coen

Anne Schult
Thesis A Sense of National Decline: Populist Pundits and the Immigration Debate in Germany and France
Advisor Sheri Berman
Click here to watch Anne discuss her project.

John Barry Schuyler
Thesis Spain and the United States during the initial years of the Spanish Transition to Democracy
Advisor Tsveta Petrova

Vinicius Bivar Marra Pereira
Thesis German Influence in Brazil: between Vargas nationalism and Roosevelt’s Pan-Americanism
Advisor Volker Berghan
Click here to watch Vinicius discuss his project. 

Erika Martinez
Thesis The Rockefeller Foundation Through The Dawn of the Atomic Age
Advisor Volker Berghan

Leslie Ching
Thesis The Evolution and Occlusion of Memory: A Historiography of the Events in Paris, October 17, 1961 as Depicted in Four Films
Advisor Emmanuelle Saada

Jarrett Moran
Thesis The Fall and Rise of John Ruskin, Political Economist: 1860-1905
Advisor Susan Pedersen

Michael Peragine
Thesis The Effect of Cultural Distance on Immigrant Labor Market Outcomes in Europe
Advisors Christel Kesler and Victoria Phillips

Manoj Thadhani
Thesis Yugoslav Dream Team: The Rise and Fall of the National Basketball Team and Yugoslavia’s Collapse
Advisor Aleksandar Boskovic

Robert Ast
Thesis Pretty, Vacant: Brummel, Jagger, and the Dandy Mystique
Advisor Lisa Tiersten

Erica Chanin
Thesis Utilization of Economic Sanctions and Soft Power Leveraging by the European Union in the Yugoslav Dissolution and Its Impact on the War in Kosovo
Advisors Kimberly Marten and Tanya Domi

Youri Chung
Thesis The Structural Limits of the EU Normative Foreign Policy: The Debate Over the 2008 Beijing Olympics Boycott
Advisor Victoria de Grazia

Toni Ciprian-Matthews
Thesis Endogenous Shocks and Banking Unions: Lessons of the European Financial Crisis
Advisor Seamus O’Cleireacain

Halley Farrell
Thesis Subverting Imagery of the Feminine Divine in Spanish Cinema: Religious and Cultural Critique in the Films of Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar, 1958-1999
Advisor Lisa Tiersten

Serena Israni
Thesis The Self-Interested Trade Policies of the European Union and United States 
Advisor Seamus O’Cleireacain

Vanessa Johnston
Thesis The Roaring Twenties, American Mass Culture, and the Weimar New Woman
Advisor Volker Berghahn

Whitney Jones
Thesis Culture, Society and Politics in Post-Cold War Germany: The Role of the U.S. Military
Advisor Volker Berghahn

Nicole Krieg
Thesis Neorealism Now: Fascism in Vittorio De Sica’s Late Work
Advisor Elizabeth Leake

Jixiu Li
Thesis Articulation of Normative Power Through Foreign Policy: How Can the European Union Act as the Agenda-Setter in its Relations with China?
Advisor Seamus O’Cleireacain

Amelia Purtill
Thesis 1968 Through the Years: Germany’s “Achtundsechtzigers” and the Struggle with the Nazi Past
Advisor Volker Berghahn

Richard Smith
Thesis Defining Bosnia: Race, Identity, and Anthropology in Habsburg Occupied Bosnia, 1878-1908
Advisor Deborah Coen

Kelly Cocuzza
Thesis Italian Particularism: How a Social Crisis Becomes a Cultural Trauma—Italy and Its Migrants
Advisor Barbara Faedda

Ilias Dourmousoglou
Thesis The Greek Crises: A Social, Economic, Political and Cultural Study since 1967
Advisor Stathis Gourgouris

Cody Franchetti
Thesis Nominalism and History
Advisor Samuel Moyn

Christopher Kreiler
Thesis European Banks: Regulation and Reform 
Advisor Irene Finel-Honigman

Andrés Lyon Valdivieso
Thesis Acedia: Dante’s Commedia and Beckett’s How It Is
Advisors Teodolinda Barolini and Edward Mendelson

Dafina Nedelcheva
Thesis Crossing Imagined Borders: History and Memory of Aegean Refugees in Post World War II Bulgaria
Advisor Volker Berghahn

Linyao Tang
Thesis Common Agricultural Policy Reforms: Legacies and Implications for the Future
Advisor Seamus O’Cleireacain

Boyd van Dijk
Thesis Caught Between the Great Powers: The Birth of Human Rights and the Netherlands, 1940-1950
Advisor Samuel Moyn

Lycourgos Sophoulis
Thesis Recurring Dilemmas and Romantic Digressions: Orthodoxy and Nationalism in the Early Neohellenic Kingdom
Advisors Volker Berghahn and Christine Philliou

Johan Warodell
Thesis Joseph Conrad and Sense-Impressions
Advisor Edward Mendelson

Miriam Wray
Thesis Ornament and Fashion in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers from an Aesthetic, Historical and Social Perspective
Advisor Mark Anderson

Darrell Dela Rosa
Thesis Biofuel Bust: The Adverse Effects of European Energy Policies
Advisor Glenn Sheriff

Veronica Mayer
Thesis Crisis of Nationalism: The Impact of Trafalgar on British and Spanish Self-Conceptions
Advisor Monica Cohen

Evan Saperstein
Thesis How the Top Bottomed Out: The Turkish Government’s Unexpected Embrace of Grassroots Anti-Semitism 
Advisor David Cuthell

Lorna Schmidt
Thesis The Evolution and Regulation of Consumer Credit in the United Kingdom, Italy, France and Germany, 1800s-2008
Advisor Victoria de Grazia

Marguerite Van Cook
Thesis Wordsworth’s Cloak of “Duffil Grey,” or The Passions of Capitalism
Advisors Marianne Giordani and Stathis Gourgouris

Kenneth Alston
Thesis Dirigisme: Through the Lens of Nicolas Sarkozy
Advisor Irene Finel-Honigman

Allison De Seve
Thesis Non-Pacifists for Peace: The Peace Now Movement of 1943-1944
Advisor Nancy Collins

Virginia Howard
Thesis Trafficked Women in the European Union: The Natashas and Victim-Centered Criminal Justice
Advisor Michael Stanislawski

Katherine Minette
Thesis The German Question: Helmut Kohl and the Push for Unification
Advisor Volker Berghahn

Adee Braun
Thesis Constructing the Hungarian Nation: British Travelers’ Perspectives of Hungarian National Identity Under the Dual Empire
Advisor Volker Berghahn

Ali Mortezai
Thesis Concepts of Freedom in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger: An Auseinandersetzung
Advisor John Rajchman

J. Armand Musey
Thesis Underlying Causes of the Disparity Between the French and English Surrealist Movements
Advisor Linn Cary Mehta

Richard Seidlitz
Thesis Russophilia in France, 1870-1910
Advisor Samuel Moyn

Wakako Suzuki
Thesis The Narrative Techniques of Modern Literature
Advisor Mark Anderson

Kristin Wood
Thesis The Cracked Cauldron: An Investigation of Madame Bovary’s Philosophical Realism
Advisor Monica Cohen

Heather Higgins
Thesis The Search for Identity in the Works of Five East European Novelists
Advisor Ivan Sanders

Gabriela Maj
Thesis “Las, Dąb i Róg” (The Forest, the Oak and the Deer’s Horn): The Role of the symbol of the Forest and Polish National Identity
Advisor Zoë Crossland

Kerry McElroy
Thesis A Defensive Modernism: Popular Culture, Cinema, and the Absence of a British Avant-Garde
Advisor Michael Golston

Anthony Roman
Thesis The Italian Marshall Plan Films: The Handmaiden of Recovery
Advisor Victoria de Grazia

Shalini Tripathi
Thesis Ionesco’s Béringer Plays: The Evolution of an Everyman
Advisor Shawn-Marie Garrett

James Weidner
Thesis Central European Literary Connections Between a Vacant Moral Center and the Rise of Nazism
Advisor Ivan Sanders