Professor Judson is an authority on nationalism and nationalist movements in Central Europe. He teaches classes on nationalist conflict, on revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, on the history of sexuality in Europe, and on European Fascism. His research interests center on German speaking Central Europe and on Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Judson's first book, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire 1848-1914 (University of Michigan Press, 1996) won the Herbert Baxter Adams prize of the American Historical Association in 1997 as well as the Austrian Cultural Institute's Prize for best book that same year. Wien Brennt. Die Revolution 1848 und ihre liberale Erbe (Böhlau, 1998) was written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the revolutions of 1848 in Central Europe. Judson also co-edited Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (Berghahn, 2004). His most recent book, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Harvard University Press, 2006), challenges traditional accounts of the rise of nationalism in multi-ethnic regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Judson also serves as editor of the Austrian History Yearbook, a scholarly journal devoted to the history both of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of the states that replaced it after 1918.

Professor Judson received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.