The Harriman Institute and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute hosted The Hugh Borton and Philip E. Mosely Distinguished Lecture on Eurasia with Stephen Kotkin, Professor, Department of History and Director, Program in Russian Studies, Princeton University. Moderated by Myron L. Cohen, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and Catharina Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Director of the Harriman Institute.
Stephen Kotkin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, and a Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University. His publications include “Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization” (California, 1995); “Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse” 1970-2000 (Oxford, 2001; revised edition 2008); and “Uncivil Society: Communist Implosion in 1989,” with a contribution by Jan Gross (Random House, October 2009). Professor Kotkin has chaired the editorial board of Princeton University Press (2003-07), directed Princeton’s Program in Russian and Eurasian studies (1996-2009), and served as the regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section (2006-09). He currently edits a book series on Northeast Asia, whose fourth volume (on Manchuria’s railroads) is in production. He is also the lead strategist in emerging markets for the World Pension Forum, an umbrella group for institutional investors, and a consultant to foundations (such as the Open Society Institute), especially in post-socialist higher education. Professor Kotkin is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He has two book projects in motion: “Stalin’s World” (Penguin) and “Lost in Siberia: Labyrinths of the Ob River Basin.” Dr. Stephen Kotkin received his PhD in history from University of California, Berkeley in 1988.
Myron L. Cohen, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and Professor of Anthropology, has conducted extensive fieldwork and other research in Taiwan and mainland China. One of his field research foci has been traditional family organization and patterns of change during modern times. His current major research project involves economic culture with a focus on the prevalence of written contracts in the social life of one local rural community in late imperial China. Other research interests in the context of social change include Chinese kinship, popular religion, community organization, the interconnections between local society and state organization and ideology, the cultural foundations of modern Chinese nationalism, and social stratification.
Professor Cohen’s publications include “Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China” (Stanford University Press, January 2005); “‘House United, House Divided: Myths and Realities, Then and Now’ in House, Home, Family: Living and Being Chinese” (University of Hawai’i, late 2004). Among his earlier works are “House United, House Divided: The Chinese Family in Taiwan” (Columbia, 1976); “Family Management and Family Division in Contemporary Rural China” China Quarterly 130 (June, 1992); “Being Chinese: The Peripheralization of Traditional Identity” in Tu Wei-ming (ed.) “The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today” (Stanford, 1994); “Writs of Passage in Late Imperial China: The Documentation of Practical Understandings in Minong, Taiwan” in Madeleine Zelin, Robert Gardella, Jonathan Ocko, (eds.), “Contract and Property in Late Imperial and Republican China” (Stanford, 2004). Professor Cohen received his PhD in anthropology from Columbia in 1967, after having joined the Columbia faculty in 1966.
Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian Literature and Culture and Chair of the Slavic Department at Barnard College and Director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. (1987) and the Russian Institute Certificate (1978) from Columbia University and her M.A. in French literature and B.A. from Brown University (1973). She is co-editor of “Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference” (2008), and author of “Abram Tertz and the Poetics of Crime” (1995) and co-translator (with Slava Yastremski) and author of the introduction to “Strolls with Pushkin” (1993). Her most recent books are “Under the Sky of my Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness” (2006) and “Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference’ (2008). She has authored numerous articles and commentaries on Russian and Soviet literature, culture, intellectual history, and politics.
