Ever the inquisitive scholar, Associate Professor of History Alison F. Frank had the inspiration for a book while doing some pleasure reading on a beach in Greece.
“One of the characters was interested in the oil fields of Galicia, and I wondered if that was a complete fabrication,” she says.
That’s because Galicia of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now a region split between Poland and Ukraine, is not exactly known for its oil reserves. By 2005, careful research and writing turned the question into an award-winning book, “Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia.” She discovered that an oil boom had occurred in Galicia during the 19th century, but overeager extraction of the resource spurred by a lack of government regulation led to a shortage of oil in the empire by World War I.
Although “Oil Empire” is a work of scholarship, Frank didn’t intend for it to be a book that only scholars would read. For her, the key to writing and teaching history is to find out how it matters to people who are interested and intelligent but not experts.
“In a sense, whenever you go and teach, you’re making an argument for the relevance of whatever you’re talking about,” she says.
And according to Peter G. Bacon ’11, a student in Frank’s course History 1266: “Central Europe 1789-1918,” she’s doing a good job.
“As a lecturer, she’s very, very, very excellent,” he says. “She brings a very fresh take on weighty and dense topics like nationalism and German reunification.”
Frank became interested in Central and Eastern Europe as a high school student in the last days of the Cold War, when she found herself drawn to the world that Ronald Reagan once referred to as the “Evil Empire.” She majored in German studies and Russian and East European studies at Williams College, and after working as a consultant for health care in Poland, decided to enter graduate school at Harvard to explore the history behind the region.
“Every time I tried to understand what was happening, I found myself needing to understand the Second World War, and the First World War, and then the 19th century,” she says.
As an expert on modern European history, she speaks German, French, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Italian. She praises the language courses at Harvard to which she always refers students seeking to do research in a particular region. Even she has taken up Italian classes in the Romance Languages and Literatures department in preparation for her next book on the port city of Trieste.
“What saddens me are students who think, because they’re sophomores or juniors in college, it’s too late to learn such-and-such languages,” she says.
Others have noticed Frank’s commitment to education. Brendan J. Karch, the teaching fellow for History 1266, knows Frank as a member of the committee that reads his dissertation. Although he was expecting her to skim through one of his drafts, Karch was surprised when she returned his dissertation with extensive comments. She had even corrected the grammatical mistakes in the footnotes.
On another occasion, Frank called Karch after going to the emergency room. Despite her doctor’s recommendation that she stay at the hospital, Professor Frank was still trying to leave and lecture in class as scheduled.
“Thankfully, she chose her health,” he says.
