Deák, István.

István Deák, the Seth Low Professor Emeritus of History, was born in Hungary in 1926, and in 1948 emigrated to France and studied history at the Sorbonne. From 1948 to 1956, he worked in France and Germany as a journalist and librarian and moved to New York in 1956, to pursue his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He received it in 1964, with a dissertation entitled "Weimar Germany's 'Homeless Left': The World of Carl Von Ossietzky." Deák taught at Columbia from 1964 until his retirement in 1997, with some brief appointments at other universities. He was also the director of the Institute on East Central Europe from 1968 to 1979. After his retirement, Deák continued to teach at Columbia as a lecturer and worked at Stanford in 2002.

Professor Deák's research concentrates on 20th century central and east central Europe. He has published a number of works, including Weimar Germany's Left-wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the "Weltbuhne" and Its Circle (The University of California Press, 1968); The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848-1849 (Columbia University Press, 1979), Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 (Oxford University Press, 1990), Essays on Hitler's Europe (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), and edited The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton University Press, 2000). Deak has received a number of prizes for his work including the Lionel Trilling Book Award, the Way S. Vucinich Book Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, the John S. Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna Austria.

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