AHR Interview with Max Bergholz on His Reappraisal of Benedict Anderson’s "Imagined Communities"

In this episode of AHR Interview, journal editor Alex Lichtenstein speaks with Max Bergholz, the author of a reappraisal article on Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book Imagined Communities that appears in the April 2018 issue of the AHR. Bergholz is Associate Professor of History and holds the James M. Stanford Professorship in Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University. His 2016 book Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community received numerous prizes, including the 2017 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association. Reappraisals are a new category of AHR article that revisit, going back twenty-five years or more, important historical works that have had notable influence on historians and historiography. The first of these was written by Cambridge medieval historian John Arnold and revisits the 1987 book Formation of a Persecuting Society by R. I. Moore. It appeared in the February 2018 issue of the journal.