Stephan Sanders-Faes is an historian of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Bergen, Norway. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Graz in 2011 and obtained the Habilitation in Early Modern and Modern History from the University of Zurich in 2018. Before joining the Bergen faculty in 2020, he taught for ten years at the history departments at the Universities of Zurich and Fribourg, as well as held the István Deák Visiting Professorship in East Central European Studies at Columbia University in 2018.

Stephan’s research focuses on post-medieval Central and Eastern Europe (c. 1350-1850), with a particular interest in urban-rural relations, administrative, bureaucratic, and constitutional changes ("ABC history"), and state transformation — that is, the emergence, and change over time, of the European national state. He’s the author of two books: Urban Elites of Zadar (2013); and Europas Habsburgisches Jahrhundert (2018). His next book will be Lordship and State Transformation: Bohemia and the Habsburg Monarchy from the Thirty Years War to the War of the Spanish Succession, expected in 2022. 

He blogs on current events at https://fackel.substack.com. Fakel means “torch” in German.

Currently, Stephan is investigating the diffusion of state authority into the rural periphery of Habsburg Lower Austria from the late eighteenth century to the advent of constitutional rule in 1860s, exploring the role of non-state actors as state-builders, the patterns of transition, and the social factors influencing them.

His other contributions to the field includes consulting for the EU Commission’s Research Executive Agency (Marie Curie-Skłodowska fellowships), the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki), and the Swiss National Science Foundation, as well as serving on the international editorial board of Atti (published by the Center for Historical Research in Rovinj/Rovigo, Croatia), and as peer-reviewer for Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Archivio Veneto, and the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, among others.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.