Biographical Summary
Anna Grutza is a PhD Candidate in Comparative History at the Central European University in Vienna and currently a David Flanagan Visiting Instructor of History at the American University in Bulgaria in Blagoevgrad. She holds an MA in Media and Cultural Studies from the Bauhaus-University in Weimar and an MA in European Interdisciplinary Studies from the College of Europe in Warsaw. In 2022, she was a visiting student researcher at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) at Stanford University and an OSUN Doctoral Fellow at the Democracy Institute in Budapest.
Her research interests include Cold War and New Imperial history, media history, and the history of emotions, science, knowledge and ignorance. In particular, she is interested in the nexus between the social sciences, experimental psychology and psychiatry with a focus on mass communication, propaganda and public opinion research in a transsystemic perspective. A pivotal angle of her research constitutes the analysis of transnational and interdisciplinary borrowing-processes between the “psy sciences” and the social sciences and exchanges between Polish and US social scientists. She traces thereby the transfer of concepts from the realm of the laboratory and the clinic to the analysis of societies and politics and to practices used in government, propaganda and intelligence.
As a Scholar in Residence at the GHI branch office in Prague, she will finalize her PhD thesis manuscript on “Imperial Laboratories of Governance in Disguise: Seeing Through the Grid of Cold War Information Analysis.”
Publications:
Peer-reviewed articles:
Dark Knowledges and Uneven Connections: Transnational Experimental Practices of Surveillance and Imitation among Cold War Empires, in the thematic block on “Rethinking the Dark Side of Transnationalism from the ‘Other Europe’”, European Review of History / Revue européenne d'histoire, vol. 31, no. 1 (2024): 99-128
Introduction: Rethinking the Dark Side of Transnationalism from the ‘Other Europe’, European Review of History / Revue européenne d'histoire vol. 31, no. 1 (2024): 1-16, co-authored with Janka Kovács, Vojtech Pojar and Anastassiya Schacht.
Among Traitors, Thieves and Brokers: The Play of Intimacy in the Epistemic Economies of Cold War Intelligence Operations, Austrian Journal for Historical Studies, 34(3), 2023, 118–137.
Cold War (Post-)Truth Regimes: Radio Free Europe between ‘States of Affairs’ and the Epistemology of Hope and Fear, Stan Rzeczy, 2(17), 2019, 125-160.
Radio Free Europe and Cold War Truth Games: Messages beyond the Great Divide, in: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Special issue on “Radio beyond Boundaries”, vol. 39, no. 3, 2019, 479 – 498.
Book chapters:
Fascism and Communism as Pathology: The Paranoid Style and the Theory of Unitotalitarianism, in: Beyond the Paranoid Style: Fascism, Radical Right, and the Myth of Conspiracy, CEU Press (forthcoming, 2025)
Imagining the Future of Intelligence in Open Societies: Venturing beyond Secrecy and Scientific Prophecy as Totalitarian Modes of Modernity, in: Forget Open Society? edited by Christof Royer and Liviu Matei, CEU Press, 2023, 174-189.
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