Mira Markham is an Emerging Democracies Postdoctoral Fellow for 2025-27. She completed her PhD in history at the University of North Carolina in 2025, and her research examines popular politics in East Central Europe during periods of transition and change.
Mira’s dissertation, “Power in the Village: Folk Democracy and Party Dictatorship in the Czechoslovak Countryside, 1944-1954,” analyzes the rise of the Czechoslovak Communist regime from the bottom up, focusing on the mountainous, rural region of Moravian Wallachia. After liberation from Nazi occupation in the spring of 1945, ordinary farmers and villagers aspired to a radically democratic order rooted in both village tradition and the antifascist resistance that was especially strong in this region – a political vision referred to in the dissertation as “folk democracy,” a retranslation of the term traditionally given as “people’s democracy.” Local Communists appealed to this vision first to win support among Wallachians and then to consolidate one-party rule after their leaders’ seizure of power in Prague in February 1948. But thereafter, Communist functionaries in Wallachia found that the legacy of folk democracy both inspired resistance and impeded their efforts to remake rural society along ideological lines. Rather than imposing revolutionary change on the countryside, they attempted to co-opt village authorities and institutions. By revealing how farmers and villagers engaged with and contested political power during the first years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, this research challenges the still-prevailing assumption that modernizing Communist regimes stood in essential opposition to traditional rural society. It also illustrates how democratic legacies both persisted under and shaped authoritarian rule.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Mira will work to transform her dissertation into a book manuscript. She will also begin research for her next project, which will use discussions of crime, policing, and punishment in East Central Europe during the 1990s as a lens to analyze how ordinary citizens constructed new understandings of personal responsibility, civic duty, and state power after the fall of communism.
Education
- PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, History, 2025
- M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, History, 2019
- M.Ed., University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 2016
- B.A., Mount Holyoke College, 2010
Awards and Honors
- Konrad H. Jarausch Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central EuropeanHistory, 2023
- Emerging Scholars Article Prize, Czechoslovak Studies Association, 2021
- International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Sciences Research Council, 2020
- Fulbright-IIE Fellowship, Czech Republic, 2020
