Announcement of the Winner of the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Central European History 2026:
The North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series (NCGS) is proud to award our annual Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize for Advanced Graduate Students in Modern Central European History in 2026 to Rebecca Epstein-Boley, a Ph.D. candidate at The University of Chicago. Her submission is entitled “… But Is It Art? Law, Labor, and Musical Aesthetics in Imperial Germany” and is taken from her forthcoming dissertation called “Boundary Music: Musical Entertainment and the Making of Modernity in Germany and Austria, 1840–1914.”
Epstein-Boley’s dissertation examines that artistically unpretentious sphere of music-making alongside contemporary efforts to draw boundaries within it. Quotidian music was notable not only for its quantity but for the attention it garnered: German nineteenth-century ideas about music—and about the place of art in a newly unified Germany—were shaped and tested in contact with the totality of contemporary music-making. Epstein-Boley’s winning submission is about those encounters. It tells two parallel stories: that of the eclectic world of middlebrow instrumental music during the long nineteenth century, and that of a nationalist-aesthetic ideology that struggled to accommodate such music. At the threshold betweenhigh and low, art and commerce, everyday music became the impetus for consequential debates about collective identity, the state, and the place of art in modern society. At a basic level, then, the central argument of Estein-Boley’s work is that debates surrounding popular, “middlebrow” music provided an important arena in which national, gender, and class identities were negotiated across German-speaking Central Europe, thereby effectively demonstrating how cultural discussions can illuminate broader social and political processes.
The prize committee notes that Epstein-Boley’s submission “interweaves legal history, cultural history, social history, and policy history to tell a so far little known story well.” Committee members also appreciated the submission’s “twinning of cultural and legal history and, especially, its nitty-gritty archival work.” On balance, the whole committee agreed that Epstein-Boley’s work “carefully blends imaginative cultural history with a thorough grounding in grassroots encounters between law and society, thereby merging very different registers throughout with real cleverness and insight.” As such Epstein-Boley deserves this year’s prize, which serves to celebrate outstanding new talent in the field of Central European history. It is to be awarded annually to a doctoral student author in recognition of the longstanding commitment to graduate education of Konrad H. Jarausch, the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the History Department of the University of North Carolina.
The Prize Committee (2026):
- Dr. Jens-Uwe Guettel (Chair, UNC Chapel Hill)
- Dr. Donna Harsch (Carnegie Mellon University
- Dr. Ian McNeely (UNC Chapel Hill)
- Dr. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (University of Colorado Boulder)
- Dr. Adam Seipp (Texas A&M University)
- Dr. Andrea Sinn (Elon University)