Basic Info

First Name
Mark
Last Name
Cornwall
Affiliation
University of Southampton
Countries
Czechoslovakia, Habsburg Empire, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Austria
Field
History

Scholar's Bio

Photo
Position
Professor of Modern European History
Short Bio

I am a historian of modern East-Central Europe with most of my research focused on explaining the late Habsburg empire and the early decades of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. My route into queer history came especially through writing a major study of the Sudeten German nationalist leader, Heinz Rutha (Harvard University Press, 2012). Besides exploring Rutha’s homoerotic ‘youth mission’ in interwar Czechoslovakia, the book examines his repressed sexuality and one of the most significant homosexual scandals of 20th century Central Europe. My queer history research is now continuing, through preparation of a book of essays on Queer Czechs (1914-1950), with chapters on the Czech lesbian world, violence in queer Prague, and the persecution of homosexuals in the wartime Sudetenland.

Website, Blog, or Social Media Link
Period
c.1800-1960
Languages
Czech, German, Croatian, Hungarian, Slovak, Serbian, Italian
Recent/Major Publications
  • ‘Heinrich Rutha and the Unraveling of a Homosexual Scandal in 1930s Czechoslovakia’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 8/3 (2002): 320-47.

  • The Devil’s Wall. The Nationalist Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha (Cambridge Mass,: Harvard University Press, 2012), 352pp [Czech translation: Prague: Akademia 2019]

  • ‘Homoerotika v sudetoněmeckém mládežnickém hnutí. Teorie a praxe Heinze Ruthy’, in Pavel Himl, Jan Seidl, Franz Schindler (eds), ‘Miluji tvory svého pohlaví’: Homosexualita v dějinách a společnosti českých zemí (Prague: Argo, 2013), 175-205.