Who decides what time it is? In Habsburg Bohemia, that question drew in nearly every other: nation and empire, identity and sovereignty, capital and a newly connected world. Railways and telegraphs created a time shared across distance, and with it a debate over who had the power to set it. Histories of time standardization have told a story of unification; histories of Habsburg sovereignty, meanwhile, have located its conflicts in diets and parliaments. This talk brings them together, asking how an empire tried to synchronize every local clock, where authority over time was located, and why time became a question of sovereignty. After 1867, Bohemia's unresolved constitutional status moved into the infrastructure of daily life: whose observatory produced noon, which meridian ran the trains, whose clocks kept the time. At stake was not only who ruled Bohemia, but how time could be controlled at all. 

 

By the turn of the century, Bohemians called their divided time dualismus, the word for the constitutional settlement itself. This talk traces these jurisdictional disputes over four decades from railway decrees to universal time. The lines of conflict did not run simply between empire and nation: German liberals, Czech nationalists, intellectuals, and businessmen appealed to historic rights, national identity, commercial interest, and civic embarrassment. Jurisdiction over time was scalar, dispersed across ministries, railway companies, international conferences, and municipal councils, and exercised through everyday practice; sovereignty over time was claimed everywhere but located nowhere. The talk closes by asking, as the satirists of the day did, whether any authority could make a polity agree on something as basic as noon.

 

 

Jana Hunter is Assistant Professor at Stanford University, where she works on modern Central and Eastern Europe with particular interests in time, science and technology, modernity, and environmental change. Her first book project, Kingdom of Hours: The Transformation of Time in Habsburg Bohemia, 1848-1918, uses time as a lens to rethink the making of modern Central Europe. Rather than treating modern time as a single, accelerating rhythm, the study examines the coexistence of natural and industrial, religious and secular, nationalist and imperial, and mechanical and subjective temporalities that structured everyday life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bohemia. Moving from rural villages and mining towns to Prague’s municipal councils and the Reichsrat, the book reconstructs how local actors reworked temporal regimes to serve imperial, national, regional, and commercial aims, offering a new framework for understanding modernization beyond the categories of nation and empire. 

 

Her second project, Testing Grounds: From Marx to Oppenheimer—Czechoslovakia’s Global Legacy, 1918-Present, traces how twentieth-century ideologies of modernity were lived, imposed, and resisted through the uranium-mining town of Jáchymov. Once dubbed the “cradle of the atomic bomb,” Jáchymov became a testing ground for successive empires and energy regimes, its landscape transformed by extractive ambition, political violence, and environmental fallout. Bringing Karl Marx’s ecological critique into dialogue with J. Robert Oppenheimer’s nuclear physics, the project reframes the history of militarized landscapes and energy transitions, situating East-Central Europe within global histories of extraction and environmental change. Hunter received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2024 and her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at Princeton University, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Herder Institute. Before joining Stanford, she was a Lecturer in Modern European History at New College, Oxford.