Spotlighting Deák’s Admirers: Lay and Specialist, Then and Now

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Austrian-American History, “How East Central Europe Changed: The István Deák School of History,” discusses the salient points of the twelve contributions to the issue. It compares these specialists’ analyses of what made Deák’s work so important with the jury comments from the 2020 Friuli Storia Prize, which was made up mostly of lay judges. The introduction also gives insight into how the special issue was conceived, how it intersected with the January 2023 death of the main subject of the collection, and how this influenced the pieces included.