Dr. Rachel Trode receives MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship

What do states know, and how do they come to know it? These are the questions at the heart of Dr Rachel Trode’s new project BURKNOW, which explores how state surveillance functioned in the Habsburg monarchy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The project takes a novel interdisciplinary approach to the topic of surveillance, viewing it not as an act of state control, but instead as a process of knowledge creation.

What practices did civil servants use to collect data about people, and what did this data mean to them? How did they communicate their ideas across the large, multilayered and multi-sited empire? Did the reality of having to rely on the state administrative infrastructure to circulate information change how data was and could be understood?

By investigating such questions from the perspective of the Habsburg monarchy’s Southeast European regions—including Styria, Croatia–Slavonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—the project demonstrates that knowledge production was a core aspect of the state’s daily administrative operations. How and what the Habsburg state knew about society mattered a great deal, since it had the immense ability to shape peoples’ everyday lives.

The case studies also underscore how we can look at developments in Southeast Europe to understand historical change in Europe more broadly. BURKNOW thus not only sheds new light on how the Habsburg monarchy produced knowledge, but also reveals the hidden forms of power bureaucratic processes often exert. In a world where debates about the role of governments in data collection and processing are ever more pressing, the experience of the Habsburg monarchy provides us with some much-needed historical context.

Dr. Rachel Trode is a historian whose research focuses on bureaucracy, empire, gender, and knowledge production in Habsburg Central and Southeast Europe during the long nineteenth century. Originally from Canada, she obtained her PhD in 2024 from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Dr. Trode is currently preparing her first monograph on the character of late Habsburg rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina and will be joining the Department of History at the Faculty of Arts in October 2026.

Prof. Dr. Rok Stergar is Professor in Modern History at the University of Ljubljana, director of the “Slovene History” research program, and a historian of the Habsburg Empire in the long nineteenth century, the First World War, and of nationalism. He is the author of two books and numerous articles on nationalisms in the Habsburg Empire, the First World War, and post-imperial transitions.