Historical narratives of East-Central Europe have traditionally centered on nationalism and empire. This talk approaches the region through a different analytical lens: time. It challenges familiar accounts of the nineteenth century as an era of acceleration and growing temporal uniformity, arguing instead that Bohemia’s modernity emerged through the negotiation of multiple temporalities. Time was not a neutral measure or a tool of imperial order; it shaped how people organized work, formed identities, articulated ambitions, and imagined pasts and futures. Focusing on the industrial and curative landscapes of northern Bohemia, the talk examines how mining and spa environments produced distinct but interconnected experiences of time. These spaces illustrate how temporal cultures - whether tied to labor, healing, seasonality, or geology - structured everyday life and shaped the possibilities of social and political change. Viewed together, these sites operated as liminal pockets of modernity which, in an age increasingly described as one of nervousness and sensory strain, made visible the contrasting ways temporal pressure was produced, felt, and momentarily relieved. By foregrounding temporality as a method, the talk reframes East-Central Europe’s modernity as something constructed through the management and imagination of time itself, offering a new way of situating the region within broader histories of capitalism, environment, nation, and empire.

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Jana Hunter is a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe, with interests in time, science and technology, modernity, and environmental change. She received her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2024. She has held fellowships at Princeton University, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Herder Institute.  Before joining Stanford, she was a Lecturer in Modern European History at New College, University of Oxford.

Her first book project, Living Modernity through Time: Bohemia from Revolution to Republic c. 1848-1918, examines how individuals and communities in Bohemia navigated modernity through shifting experiences of time. Through case studies of rural, industrial, urban, and religious spaces, it explores how temporal frameworks shaped daily life, cultural identity, and political claims in this multilingual Habsburg region. Rather than seeing modern time as a totalising force, she shows how Bohemians actively reworked temporal regimes to serve imperial, national, regional, and commercial aims. Her second project, Testing Grounds: From Marx to Oppenheimer—Czechoslovakia’s Global Legacy, 1918 to the Present, builds on this work by tracing how 20th-century ideologies of modernity were lived, imposed, and resisted through the uranium-mining town of Jáchymov. Once dubbed the “cradle of the atomic bomb,” Jáchymov became a testing ground for empires and energy regimes, ultimately transformed by extractive ambition, political violence, and environmental fallout. The project explores how modern states manipulate landscapes and how landscapes remember these scars.