On September 26, Leslie Waters, assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, gave a lecture at the Institute of History on her newly published book, Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands, 1938–1948.

In her research, professor Waters explored the ways in which border and regime changes affected societies at the local level in the Hungarian-Slovak borderlands in the World War II era. By examining the effects of redrawing the Czechoslovak-Hungarian border in 1938 and 1945, her book shows how borderland residents lived transnational lives due to the multiple changes of sovereignty they experienced in the mid-twentieth century, including navigating multiple sets of national laws, bureaucracies, state languages, economic policies, and standards of political and national loyalty.

Professor Waters is also managing editor of Hungarian Studies Review, a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary academic journal published by Penn State University Press and dedicated to scholarship about Hungary and the surrounding region; and serves as the current President of the Hungarian Studies Association.