CANCELED: “A New Narrative for ‘Russian history,'” a lecture with Marina Mogilner and Ilya Gerasimov

This event has passed.

@ 4:00 pm - 5:15 pm


We regret that the lecture scheduled for Feb. 13, 2025 has been canceled, due to speaker illness. We apologize for any inconvenience and will explore options for rescheduling this talk for a future semester.

About the Lecture: The two-volume history course A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia, 600–1918: From Russian to Global History published by Bloomsbury Academic represents a comprehensive response to the systemic crisis in the field traditionally identified as Russian history. Our history course broadens calls to decolonize, de-Russify, and decenter the field of “Russian history,” not by means of ideological censorship or by substituting Russocentric historical narratives with alternative national—and equally nationalist—narratives, and not even simply by supplementing familiar storylines with additional historical examples “from the margins.” A New Imperial History offers a principally new positive synthesis based on discarding the still prevalent nation-centered “scheme of Russian history” and the mode of national history as such. Its radically new analytical language and grand narrative systemically overhaul history that is traditionally rendered and currently rejected as “Russian.” By the same token, this history course explicates the still existing possibility of reviving the common academic field, currently trending in the direction of the atomization and self-demise of its extensive teaching infrastructure, ambitious publishing programs, and vast, diverse, and multilingual scholarly community. Volume 1 covers the period 600–1700 CE, when the region’s perception as a single geographical and social entity was forged through the interactions and conflicts of local self-organization projects. Volume 2 covers the period of 1700–1918, when the diverse spaces of Northern Eurasia became an arena of empire-building from above, and self-organization and competition within the Russian imperial formation from below.

About the Speakers:
Marina Mogilner
is Professor and Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair in Russian and East European Intellectual History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a founding coeditor of Ab Imperio quarterly, dedicated to new imperial history and studies of nationalism in the post-Soviet space. Her most recent books include: Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference. The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky against the Russian Empire (Indiana University Press, 2023); A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness (Harvard University Press, 2022); edited volume A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and Nation State (1760–1920), for the 6-volume Bloomsbury series “A Cultural History of Race” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); and Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). Her current project explores the role of modern ethnography in enabling an “ethnographic state” in the late Russian Empire.

Ilya Gerasimov (Candidate of Sciences in History, Kazan University and PhD in History, Rutgers University) is co-founder and the executive editor of Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space. He has published several books and edited volumes in the Russian Federation and the United States, including Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905–30 (Palgrave, 2009) and Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1905–1917 (University of Rochester Press, 2018).

This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, which is held on Thursdays at 4:00 pm. Coffee, tea, and cookies served starting at 3:45.