Dominique Kirchner Reill

“The Habsburg Mayor of New York” reconstructs the 8 years Fiorello LaGuardia spent in some of the Habsburg Monarchy’s most vibrant cities before becoming a New Yorker. This project is less a biography than an archival restoration of the social worlds that formed the young man who would later revolutionize American progressive politics. Thanks to research funded by Botstiber in Hungary, Croatia, Italy, and the United States, this book project will show how much of LaGuardia’s particular blend of social welfare, capitalist, and cross-ethnic politicking emerged thanks to these Habsburg experiences and that thereby the changes he wrought to New York should be seen as much as a Habsburg legacy as an American one.

Dominique Kirchner Reill received her Ph.D. with Distinction from Columbia University. Currently she is an Associate Professor in History at the University of Miami. Her first book, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice, was published by Stanford University Press in 2012 and was awarded the Center for Austrian Studies’ Book Award and Honorable Mention from the Smith Award. Her next book, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire, came out in November 2020 with Harvard University’s Belknap Press. Currently she is an editor for the Purdue University Press book series Central European Studies, an Associate Review Editor for the American Historical Review, and a member of the steering committee of the Modern European History Collective.