Victoria Harms

Victoria Harms is a DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. She spent three years as post-doc at the Herder Institute for the History of East Central Europe in Marburg and as instructor at the Justus-Liebig-University in Gießen, Germany. She is the author of the upcoming monograph, The Making of Dissidents: The Hungarian Democratic Opposition and Its Western Friends, 1973-1998 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023).

Victoria Harms specializes in Cold War and recent European history and politics, the history of sports, ideas, and intellectual history. Her work usually pursues a transnational and comparative approach and explores the entanglements of national histories in the twentieth century. Currently, she works on a project about the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and Ronald Reagan’s America as well as a project on West Germany’s positioning vis-à-vis the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics at a time of deepening trade relations with the Soviet Union.

Victoria Harms holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, a MA from the Central European University, Budapest, and a BA from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder).