Jan Surman's detailed institutional study of scholarly migration and scholarly interaction in Cisleithanian Austria is a welcome addition to the scholarship on education in the Habsburg monarchy. It draws on material from numerous archives in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Ukraine, as well as primary and secondary readings in an impressive array of languages, including, Czech, French, and Polish. The author traces academic developments beginning in the late eighteenth century through the destruction of the monarchy in 1918 in an imperial-institutional history of Cisleithanian universities. He analyzes continuity and change in postimperial Habsburg Central European universities in a seventh chapter, demonstrating that their transformation from an imperial space to a multinational space reflected ongoing trends that had begun well before World War I. In his wide-ranging conclusion, Surman expands his discussion of Cisleithanian universities, applying the categories he analyzed for the Habsburg era to the present. A useful appendix that lists the main disciplines in which students completed their habilitation in Austrian universities follows. Spoiler alert: the most frequent subject for the habilitation was internal medicine, with one hundred completed, beginning in 1848, at the medical faculties of Cracow, Prague, and Vienna.

The author explains that Habsburg universities of the Vormärz era, which during the Enlightenment had been transformed from autonomous corporations into state agencies, were institutions for the production of loyal subjects. Indeed, universities were more concerned with the education of the civil servant than with scholarship. Museums, state collections, libraries, informal societies, and the like were the primary sites for research during this time. Surman compares these universities to high schools, noting that they were far less important than they would become in the second half of the nineteenth century. Especially the faculties of science and medicine were, however, home to some internationally known scholars.

Surman then shifts his focus to educational reforms under Leo Thun-Hohenstein, minister of education and religion from 1849 to 1860. Thun-Hohenstein would have long-term influence on Cisleithanian universities because many of the professors he appointed were young. The author intertwines analysis of a variety of topics, including language, nationality, and politics, together with scholarly migration within the monarchy as well as Habsburg—and other—scholars’ movements into and out of it. Not only the Habsburg bureaucracy's limited goals for its universities and its censorship of research during the Metternichian era but also growing tension between the German-speaking center in Vienna and the non-German-speaking centers and peripheries (“linguistic subspaces”) encouraged varying academic developments in different universities as well as within different faculties.

Surman demonstrates that the division of academic spaces permitted religion to remain an issue in universities until the end of the monarchy. Roman Catholicism continued to influence Cisleithanian academia—the public, the ministry, and the majority of scholars were predominantly Catholic—well after the end of neoabsolutism. Among the consequences of this was Catholic antisemitism that resulted in Jewish scholars—many of them Privatdozenten (they had academic qualifications to teach certain subjects at the university level but did not have permanent positions)—often remaining underrepresented in higher levels of academe. The situation worsened in the decades before 1914, including antisemitic street fights at the University of Vienna, Austria's largest, owing to the growing influence of German nationalist scholars and students.

This book is generally clearly argued and engrossing. It is, however, sometimes marred by the occasional infelicitous turn of phrase, including “careering,” and “scholars of the Mosaic faith” (266). There are also inaccurate assertions; for example, that the addition of Carpathian Ruthenia made interwar Czechoslovakia a multinational state (248). I suspect the Germans, Hungarians, and Poles living in the Bohemian Lands and Slovakia already did that. My major concern about this monograph, however, lies elsewhere. In the introduction, the author names two groups who are not “heroes” in his text but are “largely touched by it.” The first group is female academics. Here, Surman mentions in passing Elise Richter (16), the first woman to habilitate at a university in Cisleithania, which she did in 1907. Richter, who studied Romance languages at the University of Vienna, where she later taught, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1935 and later murdered at Theresienstadt. More than passing mention of Richter and other female academics in the Habsburg/post-Habsburg space would have improved this volume. Indeed, the spouses of the male academics whose careers Surman analyzes receive more attention than the female academics. The most sustained discussion of female members of the professoriate is to be found in the timely discussion of contemporary demands for academic mobility.