Imperial Geography of Human Sciences: Russian Empire / Soviet Union in the European context (19th – early 20th c.)
Summer School
September 2-5, 2012,
Higher School of Economics, Moscow,
20, Myasnitskaya ul., Room 311
igiti.hse.ru/eng.html
Program
The Summer school will focus on analyzing the evolution of academic and educational institutions of the Russian Empire and the pre-war USSR on national and regional levels. Its co-sponsors are Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (Russian acronym – IGITI) of the Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and the EHESS Center for the Study of Russia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe (Paris). The summer school will be one of the first joint activities under the cooperation agreement signed by HSE and EHESS in the spring of 2012.
The main task of the summer school is to combine two key trends in world historiography and American and European Slavic studies, which have become particularly relevant and in demand over the last decade: history of science (particularly human science) and history of empires. Paradoxically, for Russia the decades in which the crisis of the empire, three revolutions and a number devastating wars fell were the time when the country became one of the world's leading scientific nations. While several leading institutes in Moscow or St. Petersburg-Petrograd were crucial to this achievement, an extensive growth of regional academic and educational initiatives throughout the multinational empire was also instrumental. Borrowing and transfer of European or Asian scientific models, values or samples (also by way emigration and remigration of knowledge holders themselves) played a special role.
The summer school, to which leading experts are invited, will provide a forum to discuss the complex relationships and conflicts of academic aspirations on the local level, which were closely intertwined with ethnic interests and imperial ambitions. The European and global dimensions of these processes will, of course, be taken into account.
The discussion will focus, on the one hand, on regulatory mechanisms of science and education in capital cities and in the province, on the other hand, on the transformation of hierarchies and attitudes in local intellectual elites between Helsingfors and Warsaw in the West and Vladivostok and Tashkent in the East. Particular attention will be paid to such issues as revolutionary changes between 1914 and 1922, the policies of the Red and White regimes during the Civil War, the geographical expansion of college and university network, and, last but not least, the preservation and deep transformation of the leading role of Russian culture in Eurasia.
September 2
19.00 Organizational meeting.
September 3
10.00 Opening of the Summer School, Introductory remarks by
Irina Savelieva(IGITI HSE) and Vladimir Berelovich(EHESS)
Panel: "The Empire of Knowledge" in global and regional dimensions
Kapil Raj (EHESS) Comparing Imperial Experience: Humanities and Social Science in British Empire
Elena Vishlenkova (IGITI HSE) Geography and Archaeology of the University Archives in Russia in the first half of the 19th century
Vladislav Boyarchenkov (Ryazan State Radio Engeneering University) Center and Periphery in Historical Disciplines in Russian Empire (in the first half of the 19th century): Modes of Interactions
11.50 Coffee break
12.10. Marina Loskutova (St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of History of Natural Sciences and Technology)
The peculiarities of scientific knowledge production in the 19th century Russian Empire: the dynamics of interaction between ‘center’ and ‘periphery’, state and society, amateurs and professionals
Walter Sperling (Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany)
Writing Region and Empire in a Russian Province, 1850-1920
13.40 Lunch
14.30 Panel: Plural Science(s): Disciplines and the Nations
Jan Surman (University of Vienna, Austria)
The Emergence of "National" Sciences in Imperial Context: Cultural Interdependence amid Political Conflicts
Alexander Dmitriev(IGITI HSE)
“National Science” between Russian and all-Russian Contexts
Viktor Karady (EHESS / CEU) Shifting Centres and Peripheries for the Production and Transmission of Academic Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, with Special Attention to the Old and Emerging Disciplines in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (1850s-1914)
16.30 Coffee break
17.00 – 18.00 Round Table: The models and factors of imperial / national science development (Moderator: Vladimir Berelovich, EHESS).
September 4
10. 00. Panel: ‘Alien’ worlds and ‘one’s own’ territory - the contours of imperial knowledge
Tamara Vardanyan (Yerevan University, Armenia)
Construction of ethnic identities in the Transcaucasia in the early 20th century: education and ideology
Vladimir Bobrovnikov (Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow) Islam, orientalists and ‘local knowledge’
Adeeb Khalid (Carleton College, USA)
Bolshevik Orientalism: Central Asia and "the East" in the Imagination of the Revolutionary Era.
11.45 Coffee Break
12.00 Vera Toltz (University of Manchester, UK) The European and the indigenous in the Russian oriental studies of late imperial and early Soviet time
Elena Penskaya (Faculty of Philology, HSE) Evolution of the “Expert Knowledge” in Russian History and Culture ( in 19th century and first third of 20th century)
13.30 Lunch
14.15 Panel: The ‘Western periphery’ and the imperial unity
Guido Hausmann (University of Munich, Germany) The Professoriate of the New Russian University in Odessa: Regional, National and Imperial Processes of Identification.
Anna Bazhenova (Lublin Catholic University of John Paul II, Poland) Historians of the Imperial University of Warsaw and the policy of Russification between 1869 and 1915.
Eva Berard (EHESS) Mortal geography: Lev Petrazhitsky’s sociology of law between St. Petersburg and Warsaw
16.45 Coffee break
17.00 – 18.00 Book Presentation: “The Schedule of Changes”: the Essays on Educational and Research Policy in Russian Empire and Soviet Union (1890-1940). Moscow : New Literary Review Edition House, 2012
September 5
10.00 Karl Hall (Central European University, Budapest, Hungary)
"The breed and the people constantly interact": Paradoxes of early 20th century Russian typological concepts.
Kirill Levinson (IGITI HSE) The Soviet and the (neo)imperial: the story of one expedition
12.00 The final discussion: The imperial, the regional and the national in the light of history of knowledge(Moderator - Nathaniel Knight. Seton Hall University, New Jersey, USA)
In the pause - coffee break
Discussion of further cooperation prospects.
13.00 - Lunch
Departure of participants
Working languages - Russian, English, French