Lecture by Jane Burbank: How Space becomes Place: Russia’s Eurasian Trajectories

Jane Burbank graduated from Reed College in Russian literature in 1967. She completed an M.A. in Soviet Studies at Harvard University and received her Ph.D. in History from Harvard in 1981. She taught at Harvard University, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Michigan (where she directed the Center for Russian and East European Studies), before coming to NYU in 2002. She has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan; and the Humboldt University, Berlin. In her first monograph, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922, Burbank explored the interpretations of the Bolshevik revolution produced by Russian intellectuals – from anarchists to nationalists – during the revolution and civil war. Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917, based on both statistical analysis and case studies, revealed, contrary to entrenched opinion, that Russian peasants used their local courts extensively and voluntarily. From the 1990s, Burbank has worked on several collective projects concerning Russian empire. One of her co-edited volumes, Russian Empire: Space, People, Power 1700-1930, brings together the work of a team of scholars working in Russia, Ukraine, the United States and Great Britain. Burbank’s most recent book, co-written with Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, won the World History Association’s Book Prize for 2011. She is now working on a monograph about imperial law and sovereignty in the province of Kazan (today’s Tatarstan) from 1870 to 1917. Burbank is currently Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2015/2016).

This lecture will be held in the framework of the winter academy “Beyond History and Identity: New Perspectives on Aesthetics, Politics and Society in Eastern Europe” that inaugurates the Berlin-Brandenburg Ukraine Initiative (BBUI).