My original disciplinary home is musicology at the University of Helsinki. I defended my Doctoral thesis, The Problem of the Modern and Tradition: Early Soviet Musical Culture and the Musicological Theory of Boris Asafiev (1884–1949), at the University of Helsinki in January 2017. Nowadays I am an Associate Professor (Title of Docent) of Russian intellectual and cultural history at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies of the University of Turku. I work as a research project leader at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki and I have a long experience in teaching in Institute's multidisciplinary Master's Programs. Previously, I have also worked as a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute (Columbia, NYC, USA), Nordic Institute (Fudan, Shanghai, China) and St. Petersburg European University (Russia).
For many years, I have conducted my research at the intersection of cultural practices, humanities and the arts and Soviet history and society more broadly. My post-doctoral research project focused on Soviet cultural theories and the intellectual culture of the Stalin era. My project produced a volume Stalin era intellectuals: Culture and Stalinism (Abington: Routledge, 2023), which was edited me and Vesa Oittinen. For many years, I have also analysed Post-Soviet Russian culture and politics, especially classical music and Russia’s cultural statecraft. In 2022 I contributed in a volume Russia’s Cultural Statecraft (Abingdon: Routledge), which was edited by Tuomas Forsberg and Sirke Mäkinen. Indeed, what had once been a set of purely academic and intellectual questions about Soviet cultural and political history - subjects that had long informed my research - have become, far more immediate and relevant amid Putin’s presidential terms.
My project “Culture’s politics under authoritarian rule: Soviet civilizationism and the case of the humanities during the Stalin era” (CUPOLA, 2024-2028) is funded by the Kone Foundation and it is a highly ambitious attempt to reconceptualize and historically reconsider Soviet culture and the relationship between culture and politics from transnational perspectives and in an authoritarian context. CUPOLA project arises from my longstanding study of Soviet humanities and the interaction and relationship between culture and (state) politics in Russian history. My multidisciplinary CUPOLA team, which includes Dr. Liisa Bourgeot (philosophy), Dr. Timo Pankakoski (political theory), Dr. Tatiana Levina (feminist philosophy), Dr. Vesa Oittinen (philosophy), Dr. Rebecca Mitchell (history) and Dr. Jonathan Rosenberg (history), draws on research skills and theoretical insights from across humanities, Russian and East European area studies and political studies.
What I am interested in developing in the CUPOLA project is a novel theoretical concept – culture’s politics –, which forms the central methodological tool to study how to conceptualize in an interdisciplinary way the political aspects of culture or as I term it “politicality of culture” and its relationship with state politics. My specific case study is Stalin era musicology. With my historical case study of Stalin-era musicology and Soviet civilizationism, I would like to show to a multidisciplinary audience why Russian/Soviet classical music carved out such a distinct societal path in the Soviet Union and why in studying Russian contemporary culture and politics, this path still matters to us.
I am a researcher of Russophone philosophy and Russian intellectual history. In my doctoral dissertation (2021) I analysed Gustav Shpet’s interpretation of Husserl’s early phenomenology as a philosophical foundation for his later cultural theory. After receiving my PhD in 2022 at Helsinki University I was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU in 2022–23. As a post-doctoral researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute's CUPOLA project (2024–26), my work focuses on philosophical continuities over the Soviet period. Exploring pre-revolutionary influences in the Soviet disciplines of history of Western philosophy, logic, and semiotics, I study how they became reinterpreted in the new ideological circumstances.
I have authored many publications, including an upcoming article ‘Shpet, the Ships and the Silver Age: On Demythologising Russian Philosophy’ (2024) as well as the recent chapters in Socrates in Russia, edited by Alyssa DeBlasio and Victoria Juharyan (Brill, 2022) and Stalin Era Intellectuals. Culture and Stalinism, edited by Elina Viljanen and Vesa Oittinen (Routledge, 2022).
I am a historian of ideas and especially of philosophy. My dissertation (1997) dealt critically with postmodern and poststructuralist Spinoza interpretations, and I have since then researched the history of modern European, especially German, but also Nordic philosophy (Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach). I have always been interested in Marxist theory, which led to my acquaintance with Soviet philosophy. With the founding of the Aleksanteri Institute in 1996, I became involved with its research on Russia and Eastern Europe. I have published on the philosophy and history of ideas of the Soviet era, both in my native Finnish and Swedish as well as in English and German. The Finnish publications include e.g. an anthology of the “Russian Idea” (2007) and a collection of essays on Marxism, where the evaluation of Soviet experience plays an important role (2018). In 2008 I obtained an Aleksanteri Institute professorship on Russian philosophy and history of ideas, apparently the only professorship in the world with such a title. Since 2019 I continue as a professor emeritus.
The Soviet era has always been in the centre of gravity in my research of Russian thought, since I have regarded the Soviet experiment of an “alternative modernity” to be worthy of note. I have published studies e.g. on Evald Ilyenkov, Aleksandr Bogdanov and many aspects of Soviet Marxism. Recently I co-edited a volumes with Andrei Maidansky (“The Practical Essence of Man,” 2015) and Alex Levant (“Dialectics of the Ideal,” 2014). Together with Elina Viljanen I edited the book “Stalin Era Intellectuals” (2022). My most recent book by is “Marx’s Russian Moment” (2023), where I analyse Marx’s relations with Russia, which were complicated enough; the thesis I put forth is that Marx’s encounter with Russia influenced his views not only on political and economic matters but had a methodological and philosophical relevance, too.
In CUPOLA, my aim is to carry out research on the philosophical discussions of the so-called “Late Stalinism” period, an area which has hitherto been rather neglected in the research. A further field of interest is the reception of Kant in Soviet philosophy, a study which I believe will have consequences for discussions concerning the character of Marxist philosophy in general.
I work mostly on political theory, history of political thought, German intellectual history, radical conservatism, political metaphors, conceptual history, and the methodology of intellectual history. Further, I have published peer-reviewed work on global governance and international law, post-pandemic recovery, theories of war, the philosophy of history, and political aspects of fiction, among other topics, and several essays and reviews on literature. Currently, I am involved in a Strategic Research Council of Finland consortium on the recovery from Covid-19, working on the politicization of legal overseers in Finland. The most complete information on my publications can be found here: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4076-9717
After my doctorate (political science, Helsinki, 2013), I have received the Research Council of Finland Postdoctoral Project, worked three times as a University Lecturer of Political Science or European Studies at the University of Helsinki, been elected twice to the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (Postdoctoral Fellow 2017–20, Collegium Fellow 2022–25), and obtained the Title of Docent (Assistant Professor) in Political Science in Helsinki in 2020. Additionally, I have held visiting positions at the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies (2024), Princeton University (2019), and Queen Mary University of London (2014).
In the Cupola project, I will work on the intersection of politics and art/culture, particularly engaging in political-theoretical and conceptual work on what it means to be political in these domains. Further, my expertise in late-19th-century and early-20th-century German intellectual history enables mapping similarities but also direct transfers between the Russian and German/European frames.
I graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with a dissertation on the philosophy of art. The author of numerous publications, I have taught philosophy at the HSE University Moscow and was involved in academic activism until my dismissal in 2020, working in the Czech Republic and Germany since.
The ARGIH and CUPOLA project are significant for my academic trajectory as it bridges my previous work and commitment to academic activism in Russia with my future research endeavours. I began by organising seminars titled “Women in Academia” (2018) and “Women in Philosophy and the Public Sphere” (2019-2020) with a question why women philosophers in Russia were almost excluded from the philosophical canon. Until recently, there have been only a few books on women philosophers in Russia, and their names are still unknown in the majority of university courses on philosophy. Those questions led me to begin working on Sofya Yanovskaya who has been a prominent but underestimated figure. The initial approach to this topic resulted in a chapter on the historical context of Yanovskaya’s life and work: “Sofya Yanovskaya in Defence of Abstractions: Between Soviet Ideology and Bourgeois Idealism”. It has been published in the volume Stalin Era Intellectuals: Culture and Stalinism (ed. Vesa Oittinen and Elina Viljanen, Routledge 2022).
I joined ‘Anti-university’, decentralised space for independent educational and research initiatives. There, my seminar on women in public space in August 2019 (Sakharovsky Center, Moscow) has been a subject of several publications in Deutsche Welle (in Russian) and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German). I have also taught a voluntary course on feminist philosophy at the Free University Moscow in 2021, further developed since and held again as a Visiting Lecturer in Charles University, Prague in 2024.
In 2020, I was deepening my study of women philosophers and expanding my network. I became part of a project “Gender Revision of the History of Philosophy” (2020, Fellowship of the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research, Saint-Petersburg) and began the investigation on Lina Tumanova. The video “Lina Tumanova: philosophy and human rights activism”, project ‘She is an Expert’ (in Russian) came out in 2021, after my dismissal from the HSE University. As the Academy in Exile Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI) in 2021–2023, I continued my investigation on women philosophers from the circle of dissent in the Late Soviet Union. In 2024, as a German Sakharov Society Fellow (Ruhr University Bochum) I proceeded with studying the dissidents and political prisoners in the years before the collapse of the USSR, finishing the chapter “Caring for the Truth: Lina Tumanova’s Scholarship and Human Rights Activism in the Late USSR”.
In CUPOLA, I am planning a project on the women philosophers in the Stalin Era. It became clear that it is just a myth that women in the USSR obtained gender equality after the Revolution of 1917. In 1930, Stalin declared the “women's question” solved and abolished the “women's department”. Emancipation was withdrawn, which has happened in the context of the repressions in the whole society. I will focus on women philosophers in the twenty-year period 1930–1950 to analyse their ways of overcoming the marginalisation, combined with the survival mode of living in a totalitarian society.
I am an Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College. I studied both music (piano performance) and Russian language and culture at the University of Saskatchewan (B.Mus.), Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University (M.Mus.), and Carleton University (M.A.), before completing my Ph.D. in history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011. A native of northeastern Saskatchewan (Canada), my research interests have taken me throughout Europe, the UK, Russia and Georgia. I teach a wide range of courses on the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Marx and Marxism, and the intersections between music and power in history. My first book, Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), examines the interrelationship between imperial identity, nationalist tensions, philosophical ideals, and musical life in the final years of the Russian Empire (1905-1917). It received the 2016 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). My second book, Sergei Rachmaninoff (Reaktion Press, 2022) offers an accessible new look at a beloved composer. In my current research, I use sacred chant as a lens through which to explore local, regional, national and religious forms of identity in the South Caucasus in the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. I have received research funding from numerous sources, including CAORC-NEH, American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC), the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.
In the CUPOLA project I collaborate with Elina Viljanen. We are looking at how ‘Russian’ culture in general and Russian musical culture in particular was defined in the West through émigré music and musicology. How did these exilic interpretations differ from the definition of Russianness developed by Soviet music and musicology? We analyse the influence of imperial legacies and Soviet and Cold War politics in both Russian émigré music culture in Europe/USA (such figures as Nikholas Slonimsky, Alfred Swan, Andery Olkhovsky, Nikolai Medtner, Boris Schloezer, Ivan A. Wyschnegradsky) and Soviet musicologists who travelled to the US (such as Boris Yarustovsky and Nikolai Kabalevsky).
Jonathan Rosenberg is a professor of twentieth-century U.S. history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research focuses on the history of the United States in a global context. His most recent book, Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War (W.W. Norton, 2020), considers how singers, instrumentalists, conductors, composers, music critics, and concertgoers in the United States linked the world of classical music in America to developments in the wider world.
In recent years, Rosenberg has spoken about the intersection of music and world affairs in a variety of settings in the United States and Europe. He has also published numerous scholarly articles on the subject. In addition, Rosenberg has written on music and world politics for the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, and discussed the topic on C-Span, NPR, and various classical music podcasts.
Rosenberg is the author of How Far the Promised Land?: World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 2006). He is the co-author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (W.W. Norton, 2003); and with John Lewis Gaddis, Ernest May, and Philip Gordon, he co-edited and contributed to Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Rosenberg’s current book project, The Jazz Expats: How American Jazz Musicians Left Their Country and Changed the World, is the story of an extraordinary group of American creators whose lives and art became intertwined with unfolding cultural and political developments in Europe. Whether in France, Scandinavia, Germany, or The Netherlands, these gifted Americans played a leading role on the European cultural scene from the end of World War I to the 1970s. Lending their distinctive sonic energy and unique personal style to urban life across the Continent, the jazz expats contributed to one of the most consequential developments of the twentieth century, the dissemination of American culture across the world. During the 2024-25 academic year, Rosenberg will be presenting work on this project in various venues in the United States and Europe.
Before receiving his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, Rosenberg, a graduate of Juilliard, worked as a musician.
My original disciplinary home is musicology at the University of Helsinki. I defended my Doctoral thesis, The Problem of the Modern and Tradition: Early Soviet Musical Culture and the Musicological Theory of Boris Asafiev (1884–1949), at the University of Helsinki in January 2017. Nowadays I am an Associate Professor (Title of Docent) of Russian intellectual and cultural history at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies of the University of Turku. I work as a research project leader at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki and I have a long experience in teaching in Institute's multidisciplinary Master's Programs. Previously, I have also worked as a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute (Columbia, NYC, USA), Nordic Institute (Fudan, Shanghai, China) and St. Petersburg European University (Russia).
For many years, I have conducted my research at the intersection of cultural practices, humanities and the arts and Soviet history and society more broadly. My post-doctoral research project focused on Soviet cultural theories and the intellectual culture of the Stalin era. My project produced a volume Stalin era intellectuals: Culture and Stalinism (Abington: Routledge, 2023), which was edited me and Vesa Oittinen. For many years, I have also analysed Post-Soviet Russian culture and politics, especially classical music and Russia’s cultural statecraft. In 2022 I contributed in a volume Russia’s Cultural Statecraft (Abingdon: Routledge), which was edited by Tuomas Forsberg and Sirke Mäkinen. Indeed, what had once been a set of purely academic and intellectual questions about Soviet cultural and political history - subjects that had long informed my research - have become, far more immediate and relevant amid Putin’s presidential terms.
My project “Culture’s politics under authoritarian rule: Soviet civilizationism and the case of the humanities during the Stalin era” (CUPOLA, 2024-2028) is funded by the Kone Foundation and it is a highly ambitious attempt to reconceptualize and historically reconsider Soviet culture and the relationship between culture and politics from transnational perspectives and in an authoritarian context. CUPOLA project arises from my longstanding study of Soviet humanities and the interaction and relationship between culture and (state) politics in Russian history. My multidisciplinary CUPOLA team, which includes Dr. Liisa Bourgeot (philosophy), Dr. Timo Pankakoski (political theory), Dr. Tatiana Levina (feminist philosophy), Dr. Vesa Oittinen (philosophy), Dr. Rebecca Mitchell (history) and Dr. Jonathan Rosenberg (history), draws on research skills and theoretical insights from across humanities, Russian and East European area studies and political studies.
What I am interested in developing in the CUPOLA project is a novel theoretical concept – culture’s politics –, which forms the central methodological tool to study how to conceptualize in an interdisciplinary way the political aspects of culture or as I term it “politicality of culture” and its relationship with state politics. My specific case study is Stalin era musicology. With my historical case study of Stalin-era musicology and Soviet civilizationism, I would like to show to a multidisciplinary audience why Russian/Soviet classical music carved out such a distinct societal path in the Soviet Union and why in studying Russian contemporary culture and politics, this path still matters to us.
I am a researcher of Russophone philosophy and Russian intellectual history. In my doctoral dissertation (2021) I analysed Gustav Shpet’s interpretation of Husserl’s early phenomenology as a philosophical foundation for his later cultural theory. After receiving my PhD in 2022 at Helsinki University I was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU in 2022–23. As a post-doctoral researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute's CUPOLA project (2024–26), my work focuses on philosophical continuities over the Soviet period. Exploring pre-revolutionary influences in the Soviet disciplines of history of Western philosophy, logic, and semiotics, I study how they became reinterpreted in the new ideological circumstances.
I have authored many publications, including an upcoming article 'Shpet, the Ships and the Silver Age: On Demythologising Russian Philosophy' (2024) as well as the recent chapters in Socrates in Russia, edited by Alyssa DeBlasio and Victoria Juharyan (Brill, 2022) and Stalin Era Intellectuals. Culture and Stalinism, edited by Elina Viljanen and Vesa Oittinen (Routledge, 2022).
I am a historian of modern Russia and Europe (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2011) and my work focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of the Stalin- and post-Stalin-era Soviet Union. My work has appeared in Slavic Review, Russian Review, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, and other publications. I am also the editor of the Russian-language volume, Posle Stalina: Pozdnesovetskaia sub”ektivnost’ (1953-1985) (St. Petersburg: EUSPb press, 2018), portions of which appeared in English translation in a special issue of Russian Studies in History. In my publications, I have explored key concepts of Russian history such as “sincerity” (iskrennost’) and “consciousness” (soznatel’nost’); influential genres including the lyric poem and diary; and analytical tools used by historians such as “modernity” and “subjectivity.”
I have also published several popular articles on how the Russian past informs the Russian present. These pieces, appearing in outlets such as War on the Rocks, The Jordan Center Blog, and Aleksanteri Insight, have examined Russia’s war in Ukraine, the persona of Alexey Navalny, and Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 2023 mutiny, among other subjects, through the lens of Russian history.
I am currently working on two book manuscripts. The first explores the history of Stalin- and early post-Stalin-era lyric poetry, and shows how Soviet lyric poets laid a foundation for the cultural “Thaw” of the mid-1950s–1960s. The second traces the history of the diary over the same period, and demonstrates that diary writing, among Soviet writers, poets, and literary critics, captured a mode of cognition that played a crucial role in propelling post-Stalin change as well.
My work on these and other projects has been supported by a number of fellowships, including from the Aleksanteri Institute, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, American Councils for International Education (ACTR/ACCELS), and the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
I am a historian of ideas and especially of philosophy. My dissertation (1997) dealt critically with postmodern and poststructuralist Spinoza interpretations, and I have since then researched the history of modern European, especially German, but also Nordic philosophy (Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach). I have always been interested in Marxist theory, which led to my acquaintance with Soviet philosophy. With the founding of the Aleksanteri Institute in 1996, I became involved with its research on Russia and Eastern Europe. I have published on the philosophy and history of ideas of the Soviet era, both in my native Finnish and Swedish as well as in English and German. The Finnish publications include e.g. an anthology of the “Russian Idea” (2007) and a collection of essays on Marxism, where the evaluation of Soviet experience plays an important role (2018). In 2008 I obtained an Aleksanteri Institute professorship on Russian philosophy and history of ideas, apparently the only professorship in the world with such a title. Since 2019 I continue as a professor emeritus.
The Soviet era has always been in the centre of gravity in my research of Russian thought, since I have regarded the Soviet experiment of an “alternative modernity” to be worthy of note. I have published studies e.g. on Evald Ilyenkov, Aleksandr Bogdanov and many aspects of Soviet Marxism. Recently I co-edited a volumes with Andrei Maidansky (“The Practical Essence of Man,” 2015) and Alex Levant (“Dialectics of the Ideal,” 2014). Together with Elina Viljanen I edited the book “Stalin Era Intellectuals” (2022). My most recent book by is “Marx’s Russian Moment” (2023), where I analyse Marx’s relations with Russia, which were complicated enough; the thesis I put forth is that Marx’s encounter with Russia influenced his views not only on political and economic matters but had a methodological and philosophical relevance, too.
In CUPOLA, my aim is to carry out research on the philosophical discussions of the so-called “Late Stalinism” period, an area which has hitherto been rather neglected in the research. A further field of interest is the reception of Kant in Soviet philosophy, a study which I believe will have consequences for discussions concerning the character of Marxist philosophy in general.
I am a philosopher of science focusing on the role of values in physical sciences. My current project at Aleksanteri Institute, funded by Kone foundation, combines historical research with philosophy to explore how values influenced scientific practice in the Soviet Union. The aim of the project is to shed light on how historical cases can guide our normative approaches to managing social, political, and epistemic values in science.
Aside from looking at values in Soviet sciences, I engage with the philosophy and history of chemistry, as well as the philosophy of climate science. My previous postdoctoral research examined the role of values in climate modeling. This project, titled Values, Choices, and Uncertainties in Climate Modelling, was a collaboration between philosophers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and climate scientists at Stockholm University.
For my PhD, I investigated the role of epistemic values in the development of periodic systems of chemical elements, including Dmitrii Mendeleev's system. The findings from this research have been published in Philosophy of Science, Ambix, and Centaurus. I completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2019, in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science
I am a political philosopher currently working on an article-based doctoral dissertation as part of the Mannerheim Professorship of Russian Security Studies Working Group. In my doctoral dissertation I examine the neoconservative elements of contemporary Russian political ideology. I analyse the role of different neoconservative actors in ideology production and seek for ways to understand how their ideas have been used to justify Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
My research employs case studies to examine how different ideas and thinkers are instrumentalised to fit the contemporary Russian regime’s needs. Additionally, I look for ways to conceptualise and demystify the underlying strands of intellectual influence whilst maintaining a critical view of contemporary Russian regime’s aggressive means in furthering its security interests.
I graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with a dissertation on the philosophy of art. The author of numerous publications, I have taught philosophy at the HSE University Moscow and was involved in academic activism until my dismissal in 2020, working in the Czech Republic and Germany since.
The ARGIH and CUPOLA project are significant for my academic trajectory as it bridges my previous work and commitment to academic activism in Russia with my future research endeavours. I began by organising seminars titled “Women in Academia” (2018) and “Women in Philosophy and the Public Sphere” (2019-2020) with a question why women philosophers in Russia were almost excluded from the philosophical canon. Until recently, there have been only a few books on women philosophers in Russia, and their names are still unknown in the majority of university courses on philosophy. Those questions led me to begin working on Sofya Yanovskaya who has been a prominent but underestimated figure. The initial approach to this topic resulted in a chapter on the historical context of Yanovskaya’s life and work: “Sofya Yanovskaya in Defence of Abstractions: Between Soviet Ideology and Bourgeois Idealism”. It has been published in the volume Stalin Era Intellectuals: Culture and Stalinism (ed. Vesa Oittinen and Elina Viljanen, Routledge 2022).
I joined ‘Anti-university’, decentralised space for independent educational and research initiatives. There, my seminar on women in public space in August 2019 (Sakharovsky Center, Moscow) has been a subject of several publications in Deutsche Welle (in Russian) and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German). I have also taught a voluntary course on feminist philosophy at the Free University Moscow in 2021, further developed since and held again as a Visiting Lecturer in Charles University, Prague in 2024.
In 2020, I was deepening my study of women philosophers and expanding my network. I became part of a project “Gender Revision of the History of Philosophy” (2020, Fellowship of the Russian Foundation for Fundamental Research, Saint-Petersburg) and began the investigation on Lina Tumanova. The video “Lina Tumanova: philosophy and human rights activism”, project ‘She is an Expert’ (in Russian) came out in 2021, after my dismissal from the HSE University. As the Academy in Exile Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI) in 2021–2023, I continued my investigation on women philosophers from the circle of dissent in the Late Soviet Union. In 2024, as a German Sakharov Society Fellow (Ruhr University Bochum) I proceeded with studying the dissidents and political prisoners in the years before the collapse of the USSR, finishing the chapter “Caring for the Truth: Lina Tumanova’s Scholarship and Human Rights Activism in the Late USSR”.
In CUPOLA, I am planning a project on the women philosophers in the Stalin Era. It became clear that it is just a myth that women in the USSR obtained gender equality after the Revolution of 1917. In 1930, Stalin declared the “women's question” solved and abolished the “women's department”. Emancipation was withdrawn, which has happened in the context of the repressions in the whole society. I will focus on women philosophers in the twenty-year period 1930–1950 to analyse their ways of overcoming the marginalisation, combined with the survival mode of living in a totalitarian society.
I am an Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College. I studied both music (piano performance) and Russian language and culture at the University of Saskatchewan (B.Mus.), Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University (M.Mus.), and Carleton University (M.A.), before completing my Ph.D. in history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011. A native of northeastern Saskatchewan (Canada), my research interests have taken me throughout Europe, the UK, Russia and Georgia. I teach a wide range of courses on the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Marx and Marxism, and the intersections between music and power in history. My first book, Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2015), examines the interrelationship between imperial identity, nationalist tensions, philosophical ideals, and musical life in the final years of the Russian Empire (1905-1917). It received the 2016 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). My second book, Sergei Rachmaninoff (Reaktion Press, 2022) offers an accessible new look at a beloved composer. In my current research, I use sacred chant as a lens through which to explore local, regional, national and religious forms of identity in the South Caucasus in the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. I have received research funding from numerous sources, including CAORC-NEH, American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC), the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.
In the CUPOLA project I collaborate with Elina Viljanen. We are looking at how ‘Russian’ culture in general and Russian musical culture in particular was defined in the West through émigré music and musicology. How did these exilic interpretations differ from the definition of Russianness developed by Soviet music and musicology? We analyse the influence of imperial legacies and Soviet and Cold War politics in both Russian émigré music culture in Europe/USA (such figures as Nikholas Slonimsky, Alfred Swan, Andery Olkhovsky, Nikolai Medtner, Boris Schloezer, Ivan A. Wyschnegradsky) and Soviet musicologists who travelled to the US (such as Boris Yarustovsky and Nikolai Kabalevsky).
I studied Philosophy and Slavic Languages and Literatures in Heidelberg, Prague, Saint Petersburg, and Turin. I hold an MA with Distinction in Russian and East European Literature and Culture from University College London, SSEES. I am finalising my PhD thesis, Alexandre Kojève and the Aesthetics of Truth, at the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture, Queen Mary University of London, supervised by Professor Galin Tihanov. My doctoral research has been funded by the London Arts & Humanities Partnership (2020–2024).
During my PhD, I was a Research Member at the Centre for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, QMUL (2023–present), an Associate Postgraduate at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin (2024), and a Research Fellow at the DFK Paris – German Center for Art History Paris (2022). I co-organised international conferences, including Images of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov at 100, Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research – ZfL Berlin (2024), Ex Oriente Lux: Émigré Culture in Interwar France, QMUL (2023), and Kojève: Here and Now, QMUL/Virginia Tech (2021). I was invited to present my work at more than 15 universities, most recently in China, US, UK, Czech Republic, France, Belgium, Germany, and Netherlands. I also delivered over 25 conference papers.
Together with Dr Katerina Pavlidi (University College Dublin), I co-founded in 2022 the study group Soviet Temporalities, with 130 members globally, exploring Soviet conceptions of time. The network is supported by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES).We run a monthly reading group, book launches, and have organised panels on Late Soviet Buddhism, Russian Metamodernism: Affect, Ambiguity and Recycling, and the Aesthetics of Return in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture.
At Queen Mary, I taught across a wide range of modules, including Literature and Philosophy, The Scene of Writing, and The East in the West. Together with Professor Tihanov I co-designed the course Adventures in World Literature (2023/24). I also co-created and delivered the seminar Philosophy in the Soviet Union and in Exile, Department of Slavic and Hungarian Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin (2024). I am committed to integrating decolonial and feminist frameworks into teaching and researching Soviet culture and thought.
The co-edited volume Alexandre Kojève and Gaston Fessard: Authority, History and Political Theology is under contract at the Political Theologies Series, Bloomsbury. A co-edited Special Issue on Alexandre Kojève: Immanence and Transcendence is forthcoming at Continental Philosophy Review. I edited Alexandre Kojève’s book on physics, Zum Problem einer diskreten Welt (Merve, 2023), and translated Evald Ilyenkov’s early texts Notes on Wagner (2024) and Kosmologie des Geistes (August Verlag, forthcoming in 2025).
Among my recent publications are a Special Issue on Alexandre Kojève and Russian Philosophy at Studies in East European Thought (2024), co-edited with Trevor Wilson; a series of Virtual Issues on East European Intellectual History (2022–2024) and a Forum on Intellectual Histories of Ethiopia (2023), Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. I have published 10 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on Soviet and French philosophy, most recently on Kojève and Russian Hegelianism, on conceptions of friendship in Russian émigré and French thought, and an encyclopaedia entry on Ilyenkov.
I regularly contribute book and film reviews and cultural criticism to various media, including Radical Philosophy, Aeon, and e-flux Notes. An interview on Kira Muratova was commissioned by Studiocanal/Criterion Collection (2023). I am a team member at the East European Film Bulletin where I edited a Special Issue on Soviet Parallel Cinema (2020) and covered international film festivals, recently in Armenia, Austria, and the UK. My writings can be found here: https://qmul.academia.edu/IsabelJacobs
Current research interests include Soviet ecologies, nonhuman agency, animal and plant philosophy, socialist AI, and the environmental humanities. I am also interested in Russian émigré networks in interwar Cairo and the dialogue between Russian philosophy and the Islamicate occult sciences. I am working on a paper exploring the reception of the Aristotelian Left in late Soviet philosophy, focusing on materialist conceptions of the soul.
Anya Yermakova is a historian and an artist, who employs case studies of experimentalism in logic from the pre-Soviet Russophone world to destabilize modern understanding of logical normativity and common sense. She is particularly interested in embodied understanding of logicality and in historical amnesia. Her recent publications include a two-part article co-authored with Ksenia Tatarchenko and Liesbeth De Mol, "Russian Logics and the Culture of Impossible" in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, as well as an interdisciplinary piece "Bodies" about embodied implications of the war in Ukraine for a researcher of the post-Soviet region.
Her forthcoming book Bunker in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series addresses bunkers as objects of historical clumsiness that slip past archival categories, modern disciplines, and legible modes of durational meaning. Yermakova holds a PhD from the departments of History of Science and of Critical Media Practice at Harvard (2021), was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sound at Oberlin College, an Artist-in-residence with the Ocean Memory Project, an ACLS postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Humanities at Washington University in St Louis, and is presently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies at Willamette University and at Pacific Northwest College of the Arts in Oregon, USA.