Christopher Brennan, guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at Masaryk University in Brno in the Czech Republic, is a historian who specializes in Central and Eastern Europe with a particular interest in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Germany, and the history of the Czechs. Though British, he grew up in southwestern France. He obtained a BA in Modern Languages (German and Russian, plus Czech) at the University of Bristol and a master’s in Slavonic Studies from Oriel College at the University of Oxford.

Chris studied for a PhD at the London School of Economics on the subject of the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire and the degree of responsibility of its last monarch, Emperor Karl I. He taught undergraduates there for four years, with a one-year hiatus in Paris lecturing American undergraduates on French history and on the history of Eastern European communism. He has written on the memory of World War I and of the Habsburg Dynasty, on the Balkan Wars, on the author Joseph Roth, and on interwar Austria. He has also authored chapters for several volumes on the collapse of Austria-Hungary and its aftermath, and is now working on a biography of Karl I.