Imperial Nation Workshop: Tsarist Russia and the Peoples of Empire

[Maiorova, Olga]

 Dear Colleagues,

Below you will find information concerning a forthcoming workshop organized by the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, the Department of History, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan. Please distribute widely. If you have questions concerning this event, please contact slavic at umich.edu. 
 
Thank you! 

Olga Maiorova


Imperial Nation Workshop: Tsarist Russia and the Peoples of Empire

Friday, May 13

9:30 – 11:15 Session I: Conceptualizing Empire and Nation
Chair: Ronald Grigor Suny [Michigan]
Ilya V. Gerasimov [Ab Imperio, Kazan’], Beyond Discursive Analysis: Reframing Empire vs. Nation. Dichotomy in New Imperial History
Seymour Becker [Rutgers], Concepts of Nation and State in Russia to the End of the Eighteenth Century
Commentator: Alex Martin [Notre Dame]

11:15 – 11:30 Break

11:30 – 1:15 Session II: Dealing with Ethnicity
Chair: Olga Maiorova [Michigan]
Gene Avrutin [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign], The Velizh Affair: Ritual Murder in a Russian Border Town
Darius Staliunas [Lithuanian Institute of History and Munich University], Territorialization of Ethnicity in the Russian Empire? (The Case of Avgustav/Suvalki Province)
Commentators: Mikhail Krutikov [Michigan] and Mikhail Dolbilov [University of Maryland]

1:15 – 2:15 Break for Lunch

2:15 – 4:15 Session III: Intellectuals and the Construction of Empire
Chair: Valerie Kivelson [Michigan]
Mark Bassin [Södertörn], Colonization Without Empire? Frontier Expansion and Narratives of Russian Nation-Building
Sergey Glebov [Smith and Amherst Colleges], The Ladder and the Rainbow: Evolutionism, Diversitarianism and Anti-Colonialism in Russian Eurasianism
Olga Maiorova [Michigan], A Revolutionary and the Empire: Herzen as a Precursor of Eurasianism
Commentator: Richard Wortman [Columbia]

4:15 – 4:30 Break

4:30 – 6:15 Session IV: Empire in Central Asia
Chair: Douglas Northrop [Michigan]
Alexander Morrison [University of Liverpool], The Russian Conquest of Central Asia and the Napoleonic Generation, 1814-1853
Ian Campbell [Michigan], Kazakhness and Empire: Ibrai Altynsarin and the Epistemological Violence of the Nationalism Paradigm
Commentator: Kimberly Powers [Michigan]

Saturday, May 14

10:00 – 12:00 Session V: The Imperial and the National: Visions and Promises
Chair: Gerard Libaridian [Michigan]
Inna Naroditskaya [Northwestern University], Expansion of the Empire under Catherine II and the Roots of Russian Historical Opera
Susan Layton [The University of Edinburgh and the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen, Paris], The Journey of a Provincial Imperialist: Evgeny Verderevsky’s ‘From Trans-Uralia to Transcaucasia’
Harsha Ram [UC Berkeley], Imagined Community: The Georgian Intelligentsia Between Nation and Empire
Commentator: Ronald Grigor Suny [Michigan]

12:00 – 1:30 Break for Lunch

1:30 – 3:15 Session VI: An Empire of Laws
Chair: Ronald Grigor Suny [Michigan]
Paul Werth [Nevada, Las Vegas], Conscience, Conversion, and the ‘Foreign Confessions’: Tsarist Regulation of Religious Change in the Nineteenth Century
Alexander Semyonov [Ab Imperio and Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences/St. Petersburg State University], Law and Liberalism in Empire
Commentator: Yana Arnold [Michigan]

3:15 – 3:30 Break

3:30 – 5:15 Session VII: Imperial Subjects, Imperial Subjectivity
Chair: Douglas Northrop [Michigan]
Paul Brykczynski [Michigan], Prince Adam Czartoryski as a Liminal Figure in the Development of Modern Nationalism in Eastern Europe at the Turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Ted Weeks [Southern Illinois University Carbondale], Representing Russian Power in Vilna, 1863-1914
Commentator: Valerie Kivelson [Michigan]

8:30 Michigan Union, 1st Floor, Pond Room
Keynote Address: Richard Wortman [Columbia]

Sunday, May 15

10:30 – 12:30 Wrap-up Session
Chair: Olga Maiorova [Michigan], Alexander Martin [Notre Dame], and Ronald Grigor Suny [Michigan]

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