"Identity and Lived Experience in the Slovak-Hungarian Borderlands in the Second World War Era"
Professional Background
Dr. Leslie Waters is an assistant professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. She possesses skills in English, Hungarian, Slovak, and German. While in residence at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Dr. Waters conducted research on her project “Identity and Lived Experience in the Slovak-Hungarian Borderland in the Second World War Era.”
Dr. Waters’s publications include “Learning and Unlearning Nationality: Hungarian National Education in Reannexed Felvidék, 1938-1944,” in the Hungarian Historical Review, 2013, which won the Mark Pittaway Prize for Best Scholarly Article in Hungarian Studies, and “Adjudicating Loyalty: Identity Politics and Civil Administration in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938-1940,” forthcoming in Contemporary European History. Her presentations partly consist of "Sovereignty, Loyalty and Identity in the Contested Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands," at the College of William & Mary and St. Andrews Joint Programme Symposium Crossing Boundaries in Williamsburg, Virginia in March 2015; "From Shifting Borders to Shifting Populations: The Hungarian-Slovak Population Exchange in 1946-1948", at the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York, New York, April 2014; and "Koŝice/Kassa as a Second City in the Hungarian and Slocak National Imaginations," at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Boston, Massachusetts, November 2013.
Fellowship Research
For her Gunzenberg-Reichman Family Fellowship for the Study of Slovakia at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Dr. Waters used the general records of the Hungarian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the records of various Hungarian financial institutions, and the records of the Gendarmerie of District VIII, Kassa, 1944-1945 to complete her book manuscript that aims to integrate the history of Felvidék’s Jews and the Holocaust into the history of territorial reintegration and identity politics in the region.
Dr. Leslie Waters was in residence at the Mandel Center from May 1 to August 31, 2015.