See Next Archive (2016-2017)

Please see below for archived 2016-2017 events.

SEE NEXT WORKING GROUP: ALEXANDER M. SEMYONOV

Big, entangled or connected, and not-uniform. One can easily put these qualifiers in front of the concept of global history as well as new imperial history. Following the threads of colonial and continental empires one can almost arrive at the planetary scope usually required from the global history perspective. The world constituted through relations and connections comes close to exploration of empire not a structure of sovereignty and power, but as a relational space made of numerous internal and external boundaries. The requirement to go beyond Eurocentrism is well heeded in the growing field of comparative history of empire beyond the normative model of maritime and colonial empires of western European metropoles. Is it family resemblance or convergence of the fields? Is there a ground for mutually enriching rather than mirroring perspectives? The talk will argue that the middle ground is there and it concerns questions of nuanced historical understanding of subjectivity and politics of knowledge.

 

Bio:

Alexander M. Semyonov is Professor of History and Chair of History Department at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. Before moving to HSE St. Petersburg in 2012 Semyonov had taught history and political science at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University since 2003. He was a Visiting Scholar at the W. Averell Harriman Institute, Columbia University (USA), Research Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Rutgers University (USA), Research Fellow at Johannes Gutenberg University (Mainz, Germany). He taught Russian imperial history as associate visiting professor at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA) and University of Chicago (USA); at the University of Chicago he was also appointed a Mellon Foundation European Scholar Fellow. Among his most recent publications are: “Russian Liberalism in Imperial Context,” Matthew Fitzpatrick, ed., Liberal Imperialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); (coauthored with Ilya Gerasimov and Marina Mogilner) “Russian Sociology in Imperial Context,” George Steinmetz, ed., Sociology and Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); The Empire and Nationalism at War (Bloomington, 2014). Semyonov’s research interests include modern history of the Russian Empire, comparative history of imperial liberalisms, global, comparative, and transnational history of empires and colonialisms, theory of nationalism and empire, history writing and production of social knowledge in the context of politics of diversity.

Date(s): Wednesday, 10/12 12:00 PM to Wednesday, 10/12 1:00 PM
Campus Address: 950 University Hall
Address: 601 S. Morgan Street
Location: Chicago, IL, United States
Contact: Linda Vavra
Email: lvavra@uic.edu
Website: https://huminst.uic.edu/
Phone: 312-996-6352

SEE NEXT WORKING GROUP: EKATERINA BOLTUNOVA

Ekaterina Boltunova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow

“This is a strife of Slavs among themselves”

Memories of the Time of Troubles and the coronation of Nicolas I in Warsaw in 1829

On May 12, 1829, Emperor Nicholas I, by invoking Article 45 of the Constitution which had been granted to the Kingdom of Poland by Alexander I, was crowned King of Poland in Warsaw. This happened some three years after his coronation in the Assumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin (August 22, 1826). The unique event in Warsaw, which marked the only coronation of a Russian emperor as King of Poland, has been obscured by the later tensions in Russo-Polish relations and almost erased from the official historical memory of the empire. At the same time, the coronation was a fascinating attempt to legitimize the Emperor’s power over Poland by shaping a new space of power in Warsaw – a space which, in its turn, was built around the memorials of Sigismund III, King of Poland, and his victories over Muscovy during the Time of Troubles.

Ekaterina Boltunova is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow; Director of the graduate program “Cultural and Intellectual History: Between East and West”. Professor Boltunova was a 2008-2009 Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University, NY; Visiting Lecturer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign  (2009), and a participant of multiple international research projects. Her research interests include cultural and political history of the Russian empire and the USSR; topography and semiotics of power; imperial discourse of war; historical memory; and Soviet and post-Soviet reception of the imperial space.  She is the author of Peter the Great’s Guard as a Military Corporation (Moscow, 2011, in Russian); “Reception of Imperial and Tsarist Spheres of Authority in Russia, 1990s-2010s,” Ab Imperio 2 (2016): 261-309; “Russian Officer Corps and Military Efficiency: 1800-1914,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no. 2 (2015): 413-422; “Imperial Throne Halls and Discourse of Power in the Topography of Early Modern Russia (late 17th – 18th centuries),” in The Emperor’s House. Palaces from Augustus to the Age of Absolutism (Berlin : De Gruyter, 2015), 341-352 and many others.

Date(s): Tuesday, 11/8 6:00 PM to Tuesday, 11/8 7:30 PM
Campus Address: Lower Level – Stevenson Hall
Address: 701 South Morgan St.
Location: Chicago, IL
Contact: Linda Vavra
Email: lvavra@uic.edu
Website: https://huminst.uic.edu/
Phone: 312-996-6352

SEE NEXT WORKING GROUP: ADEEP KHALID

February 15, 2017

6 PM – 8 PM

Adeeb Khalid, Carleton College

“The Making of Uzbekistan: Re-Rethinking Soviet Nationalities Policies”

Standard accounts of Soviet nationalities have been upturned in the last two decades. From the Cold War-era notion of the Soviets as enemies of nations, we have come to see them as makers of nations. In his examination of the making of Uzbekistan in 1924, Adeeb Khalid questions some of the premises of the new historiography. Uzbekistan was not simply a product of Soviet policies but the (perhaps surprising) realization in Soviet conditions of a project of the prerevolutionary Central Asian Muslim intelligentsia. Understanding the origins of the Uzbek national project, Khalid argues, also involves the enormous transformation in the worldview of the Muslim intelligentsia, a transformation was a veritable cultural revolution.

Adeeb Khalid is Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies & History, Carleton College. He is the author of The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 (won Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, AAASS, 2008; was translated into Russian and Turkish); and Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR. Cornell University Press, 2015 (Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, ASEEES, 2016; Honorable Mention, Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies, Association for the Study of Nationalities, 2016). He also published multiple articles and chapters on the history of Central Asia, Muslim modernism, postcolonial nation building, and imperial and colonial formations. Professor Khalid is on the editorial boards of such journals as Slavic Review, Central Asian Survey, Central Eurasian Reader and Cahiers d’Asie centrale.

Date(s): Wednesday, 2/15 6:00 PM to Wednesday, 2/15 8:00 PM
Address: 701 S. Morgan St.
Location: Chicago, IL
Contact: Linda Vavra
Email: lvavra@uic.edu
Phone: 312-996-6352

SEE NEXT WORKING GROUP: EDIN HAJDARPASOC, LOYOLA U CHICAGO

Edin Hajdarpasic, Loyola University Chicago

“Strangers and neighbors: The (br)other as an analytical device in the study of nationalism and alterity”

During the nineteenth century, Serbian and Croatian national movements defined themselves against the Turkish yoke and the specter of “the Turks.” Yet even as they explicitly named “the Turks” as sworn enemies, many Serbian-Croatian nationalists simultaneously described Bosnian “Turks” or Muslims as their “brothers,” pointing to their shared language, customs, and ancestry. As one leading South Slavic nationalist writer summed it up in 1850: Bosnian Muslims are “the greatest enemies of their own people and their own same-blooded brothers.”  My argument here is not that the position of Bosnian Muslims was somehow exceptional, but rather that struggles around Muslims’ status as potential co-nationals outline an exemplary figure of nation-making, a figure that is neither enemy nor ally, neither “ours” nor “theirs,” neither “brother” nor “Other”—an undecidable figure that I have called (br)other. The co-national, in this understanding, is the (br)other: signifying at the same time the potential of being both “brother” and “Other,” containing the fantasy of both complete assimilation and ominous, insurmountable difference—and thus making visible a range of passages between seeming opposites.

Edin Hajdarpasic, Professor, Loyola University Chicago. He is the author of Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Cornell University Press, 2015); “Imperial Publics: Reform, Patriotism, and the Press in Ottoman and Habsburg Bosnia,” in Beyond Mosque, Church, and State: Negotiating Religious and Ethno-National Identities in the Balkans, edited by Theodora Dragostinova and Yana Hashamova (Central European University Press, 2016); “‘But my memory betrays me’: National Master-Narratives and the Ambiguities of History in Bosnia Herzegovina,” in Conflict and Memory: Bridging Past and Future in [South East] Europe, edited by Wolfgang Petritsch and Vedran Dzihic (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010) and other articles and chapters on Balkan history, conflict and memory, religious and ethnic relations, nationalism, and the Ottoman legacy in Southeastern Europe. Professor Hajdarpasic research interests include Balkan, Eastern and Central European history; Ottoman and Habsburg Empires; comparative studies of empires and nationalism.

Date(s): Monday, 3/13 6:00 PM to Monday, 3/13 7:30 PM
Campus Address: Lower Level – Stevenson Hall
Address: 701 S Morgan St.
Location: Chicago, IL
Contact: Linda Vavra
Email: lvavra@uic.edu
Website: https://huminst.uic.edu/
Phone: 312-996-6352