About

Igor Tchoukarine is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. His professional focus includes research interests in history, although specific details about his research areas, background, or key contributions are not provided in the page text. As part of the faculty, he contributes to the department's mission of fostering an appreciation and understanding of the past through teaching and scholarly activities.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Archaeology
• Art
• Visual arts
• Law
• Library science
• Art history
• Geography
• Media studies

Selected publications

• Vacationing in Dictatorships. International Tourism in Socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain

  East Central Europe · 2025-11-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Guest Editor’s Introduction

  Journal of Austrian-American History · 2024-06-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In second half of the 1940s, as Europe emerged from the most devastating war the world had ever seen, tourism became a means—if perhaps an unlikely one—of aiding in the continent’s reconstruction. This reconstruction built on the experiences of the interwar years, when tourism experts, travel agents, hoteliers, and government officials recognized tourism’s significant contributions to national economies. Yet in contrast to the interwar period, the American government was closely involved with postwar tourism in Europe, both through the Marshall Plan (officially known as the European Recovery Program) and through the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), which coordinated the Marshall Plan from the spring of 1948. In June 1948, for instance, the European Travel Commission (ETC)—an offshoot of the Marshall Plan closely associated with the OEEC’s Tourism Committee—was established and charged in part with promoting Europe as a tourist destination among Americans. The OEEC Tourism Committee’s first meeting was held in January 1949 and attended by Austrian tourism expert Harald Langer-Hansel.1 In this initial meeting, the Tourism Committee acknowledged the sheer size of the tasks ahead (rebuilding tourism infrastructure, coordinating policies, reviving intra-European tourism, and attracting American tourists to Europe—all crucial issues for Austrian tourism) and signaled the need for close collaboration with organizations such as the International Hotel Alliance and private partners.2This kind of collaboration between state entities, private actors, and international organizations defines the complex and multifaceted ways in which tourism, as both an economic sector and a social and cultural phenomenon, developed during the twentieth century. This special issue focuses on these developments in postwar Austria and beyond. Katharina Scharf begins with an overview of how visual and narrative depictions of Austria and Austrian landscapes, especially Alpine landscapes, were mobilized for tourism from the late eighteenth century onward. It comes as no surprise to learn that Austria was, and continues to be, identified with its natural landscapes and that the “tourist gaze,” as Scharf writes, is “predefined by ideal images” of Austria. Scharf explains that the images took shape during the First Republic and have remained relatively unchanged. In turn, these discursive representations and narratives helped shape how Austrian landscapes were transformed as Austria’s tourism industry developed (a process in which Scharf stresses the importance of the Marshall Plan). Here, the author examines the paradoxical antagonism between preservation and conservation on one hand and tourism development on the other, through telling examples such as the American National Parks’ influence on the creation of the High Tauern National Park in Austria; the debates surrounding the Grossglockner High Alpine Road; the preservation of the Krimml Waterfalls; and the Kaprun hydroelectric power plant, whose construction was seen as a “victory over nature” and which also became a tourist attraction. These examples show convincingly, as Scharf asserts, that landscapes are “by no means static, stable, or unchanging.”Andreas Praher’s article also examines natural landscapes. Considering Austrian skiers and ski instructors who moved to the United States between the 1930s and the 1960s, Praher asks how downhill skiing, as a sport, a culture, and a business, impacted natural landscapes, contributed to the economy, and shaped the lifestyles of generations of Austrian and American skiers. Anchoring his analysis in the concept of cultural transfer, Praher argues that American skiing culture, resort infrastructure and architecture, as well as teaching methods, were shaped to a large degree by Austrian skiers and Austrian skiing culture. Intertwined with considerations of gender and antisemitism (several of the skiers were Jewish, and settled in the United States in the aftermath of the Anschluss), together with Americanization and modernization, the story Praher tells brings us to Sun Valley, Idaho; Sugar Hill and Jackson, New Hampshire; Stowe and Jay Peak, Vermont; Mount Rainier, Washington; and Aspen, Colorado. The phenomena Praher describes are not restricted to the United States, as Austrian knowledge of downhill skiing was also in demand in Italy, France and North Africa, Japan, Australia, and South America. Praher’s article reminds us of the importance of understanding cultural transfers as, in Michel Espagne’s words, “complex interactions” that are not limited to two countries but that take place “between several [cultural] poles, several linguistic areas.”3In his article, Hannes Richter focuses on Austria’s national branding in the United States. Richter argues that Austria’s image in the United States—that of a Sound of Music alpine fairyland—served two purposes. It aimed to boost tourism revenue, but at the same time, it “served as a convenient distraction from the country’s recent, less fairytale-like past,” including Austria’s contributions to the Third Reich, the Waldheim affair in the 1980s, and the controversy around the right-wing populist politician Jörg Haider in the 1990s. Richter aptly juxtaposes two sets of sources. First, he stresses continuities in twentieth-century visual representations of Austria through the example of tourist posters. To be sure, these posters present traditional and stereotypical views of Austria: Alpine landscapes, skiing (stereotyped as a male sport, as Praher also observes), women in dirndls, churches, cultural refinement, and references to cultural centers such as Vienna and Salzburg. For Richter, these “stereotypical variables” “define[d] the Austrian brand in the United States” after 1945. Yet, conveniently, the second Austrian Republic did not have to create these stereotypes, as they had nourished the tourist gaze on Austrian lands since the nineteenth century. This point is supported by Richter’s analysis of his second set of sources: public-opinion surveys produced between 1989 and 1998, a social media analysis from 2015, and a series of focus groups conducted in 2022. Based on these resources, Richter observes the longevity and power of stereotypical images of Austria, noting that they are especially potent among younger American generations.Given Austria’s controversial interwar and wartime past—Austrofacism, its ties with Nazi Germany—this post-World War II “rebranding” was no minor affair. As Gundolf Graml explains in Revisiting Austria, the emphasis and “performative reenactment” of discourses surrounding Alpine landscapes, classical music, and living folklore are precisely what helped Austria position itself as a “separate Austrian (and not a second German) nation-state in 1945.”4 For post-1945 Austria—a small landlocked country devastated by the war, which carefully crafted a narrative about itself as the first victim of Nazi aggression—the revival of its tourism industry and of winter sports such as Alpine skiing were of prime importance. The rationale behind tourism development was thus, as the contributors to this special issue discuss, a matter of both economics and identity: reestablishing a positive image of Austria, but now as a prosperous, mountain-loving nation and a land of exceptional natural landscapes.For Austrians, this Alpine branding was not unproblematic, and it revealed internal divisions. In this sense, Chancellor Karl Renner’s 1945 proclamation that both the Alps and “Vienna and Salzburg as sites of art” will “joyfully greet foreigners” was ambitious and certainly not immediately effective in the aftermath of the war.5 Anti-Viennese feelings in western Austria were at play here, as was Vienna’s initially difficult posture as a war-torn city located in the Soviet zone until the State Treaty of 1955. Yet for tourism, the disconnect between Austria’s sites of culture and its Alpine regions was not long-lived. In fact, as Richter asserts, it seems that “the Alpine landscapes and Viennese high culture worked well in tandem,” especially for foreign tourists without whom Austria’s postwar tourism recovery would have been impossible. Some of the tourists were American, but not the majority.6 Indeed, during the Cold War as in the interwar period, most of Austria’s foreign tourists came from Germany and Central Europe, and one of the immediate challenges of postwar Austrian tourism was to attract such visitors, including those from West Germany. As Günter Bischof explains, the opening of the border between Austria and West Germany in 1951 was a breakthrough for tourism: “While the percentage of German tourists was negligible before 1950, by 1952/53 German tourists made up 54% of the foreign vacationers in Austria,” and the foreign currency earnings increased precisely at that moment as well.7This, in turn, explains why Austria engaged so enthusiastically with intra-European tourism and with the ETC’s, OEEC’s, and Marshall Plan’s work to attract more Americans to Europe. In Bischof’s words, “Austrian prosperity after World War II—in which tourism played a major role—would not have occurred to the same degree or with such rapid speed were it not for the Marshall Plan.”8 Recent research has clearly showed the Marshall Plan’s impacts on Austrian and European tourism; it has also showed how tourism provides access for analysis of broader societal and environmental issues, in Austria and elsewhere.9 For all that, however, the history of tourism in post-1945 Austria (and in postwar Europe and beyond) remains underexamined.10 The contributors to this special issue address this gap, while illuminating the various angles that research on tourism can take. Their contributions remind us not only of the fruitfulness of a longue durée approach to tourism and related questions, e.g., sport, environmental history, advertising, but also of the shortcomings of a national framework. Indeed, directly or indirectly, each contribution takes a transnational approach, showing how a myriad of individual actors and institutions helped shape the tourism industry in Austria, the United States, and beyond.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Climate Therapy and the Making of a Slavic Riviera on the Yugoslav Coast

  Austrian History Yearbook · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Geography

  Abstract Beginning with the profound geopolitical changes created by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the creation of the Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states, this article examines how medical knowledge about maritime climate and sea-based therapies was mobilized in Czech popular touristic writing about Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast in the 1920s. The analysis of archival documents as well as non-specialist medical publications of Czech or Prague-trained doctors show that Czech tourists and curists (travelers in search of health treatments) were offered a freeform, all-encompassing therapeutic environmental approach. Inspired by Neo-Hippocratic principles, doctors stressed the importance of factors such as salt water, clean air, temperature variation, sunshine, flora, and modern facilities for disease prevention or the restoration of one's health. These doctors’ relative success in promoting the therapeutic virtues of the Adriatic Sea is explained in large part, this article argues, by a broad nexus of intertwined interests (such as the growth of tourism, concerns about public health, and the influence of Neo-Slavism) embedded in the project of transforming the Adriatic Sea into a therapeutic site.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A History of the World Tourism Organization <b>A History of the World Tourism Organization</b> , by Peter Shackleford, Bingley, Emerald Publishing, 2020, 392 pp., US$105.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781787697980

  Journal of Tourism History · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Maria Theresa and Her Afterlives: An Interview with Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Library science
  • Art history

  In this interview, Prof. Dr. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Institute for Advanced Study), discusses her research on Theresa with Dr. Igor Tchoukarine of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Ambika Natarajan of Oregon State University.  The interview took place on November 5, 2019 before Prof. Dr. Stollberg-Rilinger delivered the Annual Kann Lecture at the Center for Austrian Studies on Maria Theresa and the Love of Her Subjects, which can be viewed here. You can read Prof. Dr. Stollberg-Rilinger's article about Theresa, based on her Kann lecture, in the Austrian History Yearbook.  You can also read the interview with Prof. Dr. Stollberg-Rilinger in the Austrian Studies Newsmagazine.  The interview was edited by Tanner Deeds, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.

  Publisher

• Maria Theresa and Her Afterlives

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2020-11-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this interview, Prof. Dr. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Berlin Institute for Advanced Study), discusses her research on Maria Theresa with Dr. Igor Tchoukarine of the University of Minnesota and Dr. Ambika Natarajan of Oregon State University. The interview took place on November 5, 2019 before Prof. Dr. Stollberg-Rilinger delivered the Annual Kann Lecture at the Center for Austrian Studies on "Maria Theresa and the Love of Her Subjects," which can be viewed here. You can read Prof. Dr. Stollberg-Rilinger's article about Maria Theresa, based on her Kann lecture, in the Austrian History Yearbook. You can also read the interview with Prof. Dr. Stollberg-Rilinger in the Austrian Studies Newsmagazine. The interview was edited by Tanner Deeds, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.

  Publisher

• Playing the tourism card

  2019-09-11 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines Yugoslavia’s participation in European Travel Commission (ETC) publicity campaigns in the United States from 1952 to 1963, as well as the country’s collaboration with the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) Committee for Tourism in the second half of the 1950s. Based on the largely unexplored archives of the ETC and the OEEC, as well as other print and archival documents, the chapter analyses how these organisations contributed not only to shaping a specific and positive image of the country in the American tourism market, but also to channelling a greater number of American tourists to Yugoslavia and Europe more broadly. Yugoslavia’s association with the ETC in 1951 provides an early example of the country’s attempts, after its split with Moscow in 1948, to collaborate with Western institutions and to insert itself into the Euro-Atlantic tourism network. Although these multilevel collaborations were at times inconsistent, they nonetheless benefited both Yugoslavia and its Western partners, revealing that international cooperation was essential to the construction of Yugoslavia’s tourist identity abroad.

  PublisherDOI

• To serve the King, the State and the people: the Adriatic Guard’s ambiguous position in interwar Yugoslavia

  European Review of History Revue européenne d histoire · 2019-01-02 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  From 1922 to 1941, the Adriatic Guard, a non-governmental Yugoslav volunteer association, was active in a very broad spectrum of sectors (transport, social and economic policies, education, tourism, science, national defense) with the aim of transforming Yugoslavia into a sea-oriented nation. Examining these activities alongside the association’s leadership, administrative, and membership structures, as well as its relationship with other Yugoslav nationalist volunteer associations and the Yugoslav state, this article highlights aspects of the association’s history and legacy. At the same time, it demonstrates that the association’s external signs of success masked internal operational problems as well as ethnic and political tensions. While the Adriatic Guard firmly supported the state and integral Yugoslavism, and succeeded in negotiating its position within the Yugoslav space and with the Yugoslav dictatorship, because of continuing conflicts over, for instance, the national question and transport infrastructure, the association’s pan-Yugoslav mobilization faded slightly in the late 1930s in favor of a Croatian orientation. The Adriatic Guard’s position was thus precarious and ambiguous: on the one hand, it was a non-governmental association that enjoyed a fair degree of agency, and on the other hand, it cultivated close relationship with the state.

  PublisherDOI

• The History of the European Travel Commission 1948-2018

  Lund University Publications (Lund University) · 2018-01-01 · 2 citations

  article

  In 1945, when Europe emerged from the most devastating war the world has ever seen, a host of visionary tourism experts in Europe and the US realised tourism’s potential contribution to the reconstruction of the continent. The West European National Tourist Organisations created the European Travel Commission in 1948 to advocate the importance of tourism for prosperity and peace. More concretely, as one of several new organisations involved in post-war European reconstruction, the ETC produced new knowledge about European tourism, promoted travel to the continent from other parts of the world, and fought red tape wherever it saw impediments to travellers’ mobility and tourism development. Seventy years down the road, the ETC remains as relevant as ever. For 70 years, the ETC has been a key institution in European tourism, sharing knowledge, coordinating efforts across borders, and connecting government and industry stakeholders. This book is thus about an organisation that has played, and continues to play, a crucial role in shaping contemporary European tourism.

  Publisher

• Book Reviews

  Journeys · 2015-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Corinne Fowler, Charles Forsdick, and Ludmilla Kostova, eds., Travel and Ethics: Theory and Practice (2014) Reviewed by David G. Farley Antón M. Pazos, ed., Pilgrims and Pilgrimages as Peacemakers in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (2013) Reviewed by Jill Dubisch Kathryn Walchester, Gamle Norge and Nineteenth-Century British Women Travellers in Norway (2014) Reviewed by Miriam L. Wallace Jim Bowman, Narratives of Cyprus: Modern Travel Writing and Cultural Encounters since Lawrence Durrell (2015) Reviewed by Eroulla Demetriou Diane P. Koenker, Club Red: Vacation Travel in the Soviet Dream (2013) Reviewed by Igor Tchoukarine

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ambika Natarajan

  Massachusetts General Hospital

  2 shared

• Jill Dubisch

  1 shared

• Sune Bechmann Pedersen

  Stockholm University

  1 shared

• Miriam L. Wallace

  Texas Christian University

  1 shared

• Dominika Prejdová

  1 shared

• Frank Schipper

  1 shared

• Ondřej Daniel

  1 shared

• František Šístek

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Research Grant from the Swedish Research Council (2023-25)
• University of Minnesota Imagine Fund Award (2019 and 2024)
• Visiting Fellow at Lund University, Sweden (2019)
• Visiting Fellow, Institute for East and Southeast European S…
• University of Minnesota Alexander Dubček Award (2016)