Ongoing Research Projects

ANNUAL SEMINAR OF AB IMPERIO QUARTERLY: EMPIRE STUDIES – A ROADMAP FOR THE 2010s

The primary goal of Ab Imperio seminar is to build on the journal’s mission: to bridge the ever-broadening divides between different disciplines, narrowly defined area studies, and national academic traditions. By bringing together scholars from different regional and topical fields, the journal strives to restore a broader historical context that was sustained in the past by the common field, formerly known as “Russian/Soviet Studies.” The disintegration of that field into a variety of national and regional historiographies opened up new research possibilities and inaugurated new research agendas, but the parallel demise of the common sphere of knowledge and reference threatens the very prospects of newly independent areas studies. Any attempts to write a “Russian” history in isolation from Ukrainian historical materials, or to sustain a narrow focus on Central Asian events without a proper knowledge of the empire-wide policies and institutions lead to all kinds of one-sided and even erroneous conclusions. A broad historical context and a common sphere of reference are needed to avoid a usual anachronism of imposing contemporary political map upon the distant past. (An opposite development is highly improbable: the broadening of the scope of historical analysis would not result in the erosion of the present-day political sovereignty). It is quite a challenge to attempt reconstructing a broader historiographic context in the absence of any formal or informal institutional settings.

Thus, the first stage of a new series of seminars conceived by Ab Imperio can be compared to the outlining a roadmap. We depart from an assumption that individual scholars operate within semi-isolated research fields structured, simultaneously, by the unique empirical case studies and universal analytical models and concepts. The former make a cross-field dialogue impossible (every case study is unlike the other), the latter make it redundant (“microhistory” or “new political history” are too general notions). What is missing is the sphere of middle-range generalizations that would provide for a meaningful dialogue of scholars studying different periods in the past of neighboring regions. Ab Imperio offers a general framework of empire studies as a middle-range theoretical device allowing to accommodate individual unique case studies in a common conceptual sphere without the imposition of any single normative explanatory scheme (be it a narrative of groupness, or a teleological perspective of regional development). Imperial history will be used as an analytical resource for re-thinking a variety of historical phenomena that include contested historical memory, cultural construction of identity in the situation of historically formed diversity, historically varied projects and modernity and the definition of the self.

The seminar will encourage scholars to reflect on their individual research projects as belonging to their respective specific fields, yet at some level related to each other as different “windows” on the common heterogeneous historical reality. As a general guide, the organizers offer the following questions:


1. How does the specific historical experience of the post-Soviet space complicate the universality of historical paradigms? Linked to this question is the query about how do contemporary scholars define the boundaries of the region from the viewpoint of their own research questions.


2. Are there interesting cases that prove that historians of the region can be pioneers in suggesting new methodological frameworks for other historical fields? Alternatively, which particular aspects of the study of the region have the potential to influence historical scholarship at large?


3. One can say that the regional studies of post Soviet space have been behind the “western” innovative historical research in opening such perspectives as cultural history or historical memory. Is it the case, judging from your experience? What is the reason for this state of affairs?


4. What are the challenges of synthesizing historical knowledge in usable narratives in our region? In other words, how can the rapidly disintegrating and destabilizing field be thought of as a coherent text to be translated into textbooks?

Ab Imperio seminar will take place in Kazan on October 7-11, 2010. Papers presented at the seminar may be published in AI 1-2011. The working language of the seminar is English.

NB: Ab Imperio covers travel expenses of the participants (including airfaire and ground transportation, hotel, and per diem in Kazan).