Mira Markham is an Emerging Democracies Postdoctoral Fellow for 2025-27. She is a historian of modern East Central Europe interested in popular politics during periods of revolutionary change. Her dissertation, “Power in the Village: Folk Democracy and Party Dictatorship in Postwar Czechoslovakia,” takes a microhistorical perspective to show how the institutions, rhetoric, and political commitments established through antifascist resistance enabled the Czechoslovak Communists’ rise to power, but then hampered their plans to transform rural society.
As a postdoctoral fellow, Mira will work to edit her dissertation for publication. She will also begin research for her next project, which traces the roots of contemporary political division in the Czech Republic and Slovakia in debates over public morality during the early 1990s.
Education
- PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, History
- M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, History
- M.Ed., University of Massachusetts-Amherst
- B.A., Mount Holyoke College
Selected awards and honors
- Canadian Association of Slavists Article of the Year Prize, 2025
- Konrad H. Jarausch Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History, 2023
- Emerging Scholars Article Prize, Czechoslovak Studies Association, 2021
- International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council, 2020
- Fulbright-IIE Fellowship, Czech Republic, 2020
