Cristina Florea

Overview

Cristina Florea is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Cornell University, researching and teaching the histories of Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on borderlands, imperial entanglements and competition, and the interplay of nationalisms and empires in the region. She is the author of Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland (Princeton University Press, 2025), which traces the making and remaking of a disputed borderland, now straddling the frontier between Romania and Ukraine, across two centuries of imperial and national rule. Combining a local, microhistorical lens with a sensitivity to global context, the book shows how remote, seemingly peripheral places have shaped the development of modern statehood and sovereignty. She is currently writing a history of Vienna under four-power occupation, 1945–1955, told from the street up — a study of how occupiers, survivors, and displaced persons from across Eastern Europe negotiated the end of one war and the beginning of another. Florea's interests also include mass emigration and displacement in Eurasia, challenges to democracy, the workings of authoritarianism, and the rise of extremist politics on both the right and the left in interwar Europe.