Thomas Ort

About Thomas Ort

Thomas was born in New York City shortly after his parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia. He is Associate Professor of modern European history at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his PhD from New York University and his BA from Brown University. The main focus of his research has been on modernist and avant-garde movements in early twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, but his most recent work concerns the politics of memory in postwar Eastern Europe. In addition to the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, he has received numerous other grants and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Council for Learned Societies, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book Art and Life in Modernist Prague: Karel Čapek and his Generation, 1911-1938 was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. It was subsequently translated into Czech under the title Umění a život v modernistické Praze: Karel Čapek a jeho generace, 1911-1938 and published in Prague in 2016. His new book project, Meaning, Memory, and the Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, challenges conventional understandings of “memory” through an examination of the ever-evolving interpretations of the killing of Reinhard Heydrich, the SS general and architect of the Final Solution who was assassinated in Prague in 1942.