Russia’s Worlds: The Russian and Soviet North Pacific

This event will be held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. There will be no in-person event.

Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on YouTube Live.

Please join us for an event in the Russia’s Worlds Lecture Series, a discussion with Bathsheba Demuth (Brown University) and Ilya Vinkovetsky (Simon Fraser University).

BIOGRAPHIES

Bathsheba Demuth is Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University, where she is also an affiliated faculty member in Native American and Indigenous Studies and Science and Technology Studies. An environmental historian, her research focuses on the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic and on how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect. Her first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (Norton, 2019) examined capitalist and socialist attempts to transform the northern borderlands of both countries, while her new research turns to the Yukon River watershed and how rights for nonhuman beings have been conceived and codified across indigenous, imperial, and nation-state traditions.

Ilya Vinkovetsky is associate professor in the History Department at Simon Fraser University. His book Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire dealt with Alaska as a colony within the Russian Empire, the relations between Russian colonists and North American First Nations, and the reasons for the decision to sell Alaska to the United States in the 1860s. He has also written about nation-building in the Balkans following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. His current work examines the history of Russia’s roads and transportation networks before the advent of the railroad.

Russia’s Worlds Lecture Series:

In the last two decades historians have consistently challenged the center-periphery approach to the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, at the same time establishing the inadequacy of state boundaries to encompass imperial and Soviet experience. “Russia’s Worlds” brings together innovative work on connections between the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the outside world, looking at how these states, their cultures, and their subjects interacted with the wider world, other states, and the international scene based on religion, ethnicity, ideology and professional affiliations. In this series of six talks, twelve speakers working at the intersection of several fields will share new perspectives on how international law, migration, environment, traveling ideas, individuals and commodities tied Russia to a larger world and the other way around.