Course description
HIST5386 - New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia and Its Global Entanglements
This course will draw on the 25-yearlong project developed by the team of Ab Imperio Journal, which aimed at developing a new analytical language and framework for understanding changing imperial formations and regimes of diversity in the region of Northern Eurasia. The project has faced several challenges of different kind and central to critical historical reflection: 1) the challenge of methodological nationalism in interpretation of difference as relating to ethno-nationalist groupness; 2) the challenge of centered perspective and marginalization of comparative and globally entangled dimensions in writing the history of the Russian empire, especially as a type of “continental empire”; 3) the dilemma of decolonizing approach that brings in pluralism of voices and misses the question of creating a new narrative and explanation as integral requirement of historical analysis. The course will cover the debates that addressed these epistemological challenges and an attempt at a new historical narrative offered in New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia (2 vols. Bloomsbury).
- Instructor: Alexander Semyonov