Alexander Etkind (born 1955, St. Petersburg, Russia) is a historian and cultural scientist. [1] [2] He is a professor of history and the Chair of Russia-Europe relations at the European University Institute. [3] He is fellow of the European Institute for International Law and International Relations. [4]
He completed his B.A. and M.A. in 1978 in Psychology and English at Leningrad State University. [3] In 1998, he defended PhD (Habilitation) in Slavonic Studies/ Cultural History at the University of Helsinki. [2] [5] [3] Etkind taught at the European University at St. Petersburg then at Cambridge University where he was also a fellow of King's College. [6] [2] He was a visiting fellow at New York University, Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and other places. [7] [3] [8]
Etkind's research focuses on European and Russian intellectual history, memory studies, natural resources and the history of political economy, empire and colonies in Europe, and Russian politics, novels and film in the 21st century. [3] [9]
Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources is a world history (with special emphasis on Russia) of the economic and political roles of grain, meat, fur, sugar, hemp, metals, peat, coal and oil.
From 2010 to 2013, he led the international research project “Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine”. The project studied the role of cultural memory of the Soviet era in Russia, Ukraine and Poland and received funding from Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA). [9]
Etkind has publications in Russian and English, and speaks both languages. [3] [5]
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian author and Soviet dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His non-fiction work The Gulag Archipelago "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies.
The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й", but the full official name of the agency changed several times.
The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is a three-volume series written between 1958 and 1968 by Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident. It was first published in 1973 by the Parisian publisher YMCA-Press, and it was translated into English and French the following year. It explores a vision of life in what is often known as the Gulag, the Soviet labour camp system. Solzhenitsyn constructed his highly detailed narrative from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and his own experience as a Gulag prisoner. Contemporaries, including Solzhenitsyn's ex-wife Natalya Reshetovskaya, have questioned the authenticity and reliability of Solzhenitsyn's account, describing it as sensationalized.
Alexander Theodore Callinicos is a Rhodesian-born British political theorist and activist. An adherent of Trotskyism, he is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and serves as its International Secretary. Between 2009 and 2020 he was the editor of International Socialism, the SWP's theoretical journal, and has published a number of books.
Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish–British sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is a British intellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Wolfson History Prize in 1979 and the Balzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London.
Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was a Russian writer and Soviet dissident known as a defendant in the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial of 1965.
William Christian Bullitt Jr. was an American diplomat, journalist, and novelist. He is known for his special mission to negotiate with Lenin on behalf of the Paris Peace Conference, often recalled as a missed opportunity to normalize relations with the Bolsheviks. He was also the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union and the U.S. ambassador to France during World War II. In his youth, he was considered a radical, but he later became an outspoken anticommunist.
Rosi Braidotti is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician. Born in Italy, she studied in Australia and France and works in the Netherlands. Braidotti is currently Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University, where she has taught since 1988. She was professor and the founding director of Utrecht University's women's studies programme (1988-2005) and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities (2007-2016). She has been awarded honorary degrees from Helsinki (2007) and Linkoping (2013); she is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) since 2009, and a Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE) since 2014. Her main publications include Nomadic Subjects (2011) and Nomadic Theory (2011), both with Columbia University Press, The Posthuman (2013), Posthuman Knowledge (2019), and Posthuman Feminism (2022) with Polity Press. In 2016, she co-edited Conflicting Humanities with Paul Gilroy, and The Posthuman Glossary in 2018 with Maria Hlavajova, both with Bloomsbury Academic.
Robert John Bartlett, CBE, FBA, FRSE is an English historian and medievalist. He is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Mediaeval History Emeritus at the University of St Andrews.
Putinland is a political neologism referring to Russia under the rule of Vladimir Putin. The term has been used in various contexts, from portraying Russia as a corrupt and murderous regime where the line between security forces and organized crime is blurred, to a military industrial oil and gas concern that is ready to swat away criticism at home, squash troublesome neighbours, and sacrifice personal freedoms in the name of a strong centralised state.
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
A petrostate, oil state, or petrocracy is a country whose economy is heavily dependent on the extraction and export of oil or natural gas. The presence alone of large oil and gas industries does not define a petrostate: major oil producers that also have diversified economies are not classified as petrostates due to their ability to generate income from various industries and sectors beyond the oil industry. Petrostates also have highly concentrated political and economic power, resting in the hands of an elite, as well as unaccountable political institutions which are susceptible to corruption.
Joy Damousi, is an Australian historian and Professor and Director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She was Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne for most of her career, and retains a fractional appointment. She was the President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 2017 to 2020.
Russian imperialism is the political, economic and cultural influence, as well as military power, exerted by Russia and its predecessor states, over other countries and territories. It includes the conquests of the Tsardom of Russia, the Russian Empire, the imperialism of the Soviet Union, and the neo-imperialism of the Russian Federation. Some postcolonial scholars have noted the lack of attention given to Russian and Soviet imperialism in the discipline.
The Solovetsky Stone is a monument to the victims of political repression in the Soviet Union and to those who have fought and fight for freedom. It stands in Troitskaya (Trinity) Square in Saint Petersburg, near several other buildings directly related to political repression in the Soviet era—the House of Tsarist Political Prisoners; the prison and necropolis of the Peter and Paul Fortress; and the Bolshoy Dom or headquarters of the NKVD, both in the city and the surrounding Leningrad Region. Nowadays, the Stone also serves as a focus for commemorative events and for gatherings related to current human rights issues.
The imperial boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. This concept originates with Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) where it is called the terrific boomerang to explain the origins of European fascism in the first half of the 20th century. Hannah Arendt agreed with this usage, calling it the boomerang effect in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). According to both writers, the methods of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were not exceptional from a world-wide view because European colonial empires had been killing millions of people worldwide as part of the process of colonization for a very long time. Rather, they were exceptional in that they were applied to Europeans within Europe, rather than to colonized populations in the Global South. It is sometimes called Foucault's boomerang even though Michel Foucault did not originate the term.
Andrii Portnov is a Ukrainian historian, essayist, and editor. He is the chair professor of entangled history of Ukraine at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). and a director of the PRISMA UKRAЇNA Research Network Eastern Europe. He specializes in Polish-Russian-Ukrainian history and memory studies.
Gábor Klaniczay is professor of Medieval Studies at the Department of Medieval Studies of the Central European University, Budapest/Vienna. He is also titulary professor at the Department of Medieval History at the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He is corresponding fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Antje Wiener is a German political scientist and international relations scholar. Since 2009, she has held the chair of Political Science, especially Global Governance at the University of Hamburg. With her research, Wiener contributes to international relations theory, critical constructivist norms research, and contestation theory. Empirically, her research focusses on human rights and the rule of law in both a European and a global context. She has also investigated the contestation and constitution of the prohibition of sexual violence, the international prohibition of torture, and various norms of international security governance.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
