Prof. Dr. Dominique Reill 

Why do New York City’s public parks, housing projects, and public-oriented cultural venues emulate their European equivalents so strongly? My work-in-progress 'The Habsburg Mayor of New York: Fiorello LaGuardia' tries to answer this question by investigating the eight years that the city’s most beloved mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, lived in the industrial, migrant-rich cities of the Habsburg Europe before taking his first steps as an adult in New York. Through years of research in the archives of Trieste, Fiume/Rijeka, Budapest, Zagreb, Washington, D.C., and New York City, this research project aims to give a social biography of an impoverished, self-educated, multi-lingual migrant turned political firebrand who lived in urban Babylons on both sides of the Atlantic. This analysis of the worlds that formed the man who would later reform his world in turn will not just be a fascinating, if often overlooked, story. It will also show how political transformations in turn-of-the-century global cities mutually impacted one another and challenge our notions of the development of US progressivism in the early twentieth century and of “the Old World.”