In the decades leading up to World War I, nationalist activists in imperial Austria laboured to transform linguistically mixed rural regions into politically charged language frontiers. They hoped to remake local populations into polarized peoples and their villages into focal points of the political conflict that dominated the Habsburg Empire. But they often found bilingual inhabitants accustomed to cultural mixing who were stubbornly indifferent to identifying with only one group. Using examples from several regions, including Bohemia and Styria, Pieter Judson traces the struggle to consolidate the loyalty of local populations for nationalist causes. Whether German, Czech, Italian, or Slovene, the nationalists faced similar and unexpected difficulties in their struggle to make nationalism relevant to local concerns and to bind people permanently to one side. Judson examines the various strategies of the nationalist activists, from the founding of minority language schools to the importation of colonists from other regions, from projects to modernise rural economies to the creation of a tourism industry. By 1914, they succeeded in projecting a public perception of nationalist frontiers, but largely failed to nationalize the populations. "Guardians of the Nation" offers a provocative challenge to standard accounts of the march of nationalism in modern Europe.

Professor Judson is an authority on nationalism and nationalist movements in Central Europe. He teaches classes on nationalist conflict, on revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, on the history of sexuality in Europe, and on European Fascism. His research interests center on German speaking Central Europe and on Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Judson's first book, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire 1848-1914 (University of Michigan Press, 1996) won the Herbert Baxter Adams prize of the American Historical Association in 1997 as well as the Austrian Cultural Institute's Prize for best book that same year. Wien Brennt. Die Revolution 1848 und ihre liberale Erbe (Böhlau, 1998) was written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the revolutions of 1848 in Central Europe. Judson also co-edited Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (Berghahn, 2004). His most recent book, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Harvard University Press, 2006), challenges traditional accounts of the rise of nationalism in multi-ethnic regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Judson also serves as editor of the Austrian History Yearbook, a scholarly journal devoted to the history both of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of the states that replaced it after 1918.

Professor Judson received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.