You must register by 5pm on November 13, 2024 in order to attend this event.

Please join the Program on US-Russia Relations at the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Nathaniel Knight. Moderated by Elise Giuliano.

In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, scholars of the Russian Empire entered a phase of a critical self-examination.  Widely accepted narratives of Russia’s historical development, some have argued, only serve to valorize imperial domination and exclude the voices of peoples bearing the burden of Russian oppression.  What is needed, it is suggested, is to shift the narrative away from the Imperial center to shed more light on the autonomous development of subject peoples.   Yet such calls for decolonization have been met with skepticism and resistance in some quarters.  Historians, in particular, often see the decolonization paradigm as an essentialist model that recycles nationalist tropes and neglects the advances of recent scholarship. In his talk, Professor Knight will weigh these contrasting viewpoints focusing on underlying historical narratives and how they have evolved since the end of the Cold War.

Nathaniel Knight is a historian of Imperial Russia.  He has published numerous works on the history of Russian ethnography, Russian orientalism, the Russian intelligentsia and understandings of race and ethnicity in the Russian Empire.  His most recent article is “Skepticism, Faith and the Problem of Historical Authenticity: Nikolai Nadezhdin’s Search for Truth,” in Canadian-American Slavic Studies (2023).