Holly is a historian of Europe at Brown University. Her work focuses on the relationship between foreign policy, social policy, science and literature as manifest in the European state system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII, was published in May 2009 by Stanford University Press.
Holly is currently completing a book on the emergence of ‘questions’ – the Eastern question, Jewish question, Polish question, woman question, worker question, etc. – in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Age of Questions is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. She has also begun work on a history of the role played by consuls and consular reform in transforming the international system over the course of the same period.