Sommersemester 2025

13248 (Seminar) - Imperium inter pares. Nation und Konfession im Russländischen Reich (Di 12-14)

31201 (Seminar) - Der Krimkrieg. Geschichte und Gegenwart eines europäischen Konfliktes, 1853-2014 (Do 14-16)

Wintersemester 2024/25

31204 (Seminar) - Tides of Empire: Nature and Maritime Resources in the Russian Anthropocene (Di 10-12)

Sommersemester 2024

31201 (Seminar) - Unternehmerkarrieren als "imperiale Biographien": Mobilitätsmuster und industrielle Lebenswege in Russland zwischen Reform und Revolution (Di 14-16)

Wintersemester 2023/24

31202 (Seminar) - Wo liegt das Morgenland? Zentralasien und der Kaukasus im russischen Orient-Diskurs (Di 10-12)

Sommersemester 2023

31204 (Seminar) - Opfer zweier Diktaturen. Zwangsarbeit unter Hitler und Stalin in der osteuropäischen Erinnerung (Do 14-18)

Broad Fields:

• History of Central Asia under Russian and Soviet rule

• Economic History of the Russian Empire

• Environmental History

• Maritime History

Research Topics:

borders and borderlands, resource frontiers, settler colonialism, legal pluralism, colonial property regimes, colonial water management

Research Projects:

Dissertation Project: Ambivalent Spaces of Empire. Lionozov Enterprise and the Making of an Imperial Borderland in Central Asia, 1818-1925

Throughout the late nineteenth century, the Russian Empire remained a layered and hybrid affair, resting on multiple confessional, economic, and political foundations. It was also an empire administered by corporations, companies, and proprietors. By focusing on the history of the Lionozov Enterprise, this book intends to re-evaluate the centrality of corporate structures in the consolidation of centralized rule across Eurasian borderlands. 
 
The territory under consideration stretches over the densely populated Turkmen coast stitched together by alluvial banks of the Atrek and Gurgen River. Populated by predominantly transient nomadic communities, this complex basin area presents a rich geography to think about the relationship between ecology, extraction, and mobility. In the nineteenth century, the Russian and Qajar Empires and their unwavering will to impose their own ideas of legality met on this watershed. Triggered by rival imperial dynamics, Tehran and St. Petersburg speeded up the process by which this landscape was to be permanently fixed. As both empires embarked on the idea of introducing new proprietary titles upon fisheries, oil, and land, the Atrek’s essential character as a fluid boundary changed. This study aims to recover the transformation of the Russo-Iranian frontier into a new terrain of property and stresses the importance of local go-betweeners and capitalists for understanding the everyday modalities of imperial expansion.   

At its core, this book advances the argument that the Russian imperial state sustained its presence in the Central Asian borderlands not by squelching plurality, but rather by maintaining a situation of legal ambiguity with regard to exterritorial ownership practices. The three interrelated chapters will present a case in imperial territorialization by examining various documentary regimes of property in the Atrek watershed. Engaging critically with New Imperial and Environmental History, this study situates the Russo-Iranian border within a broader cross-regional context of South Eurasia and reflects deeper shifts in how the late Tsarist policymakers conceptualized indirect rule, sovereignty, and empire. 

Turkmen fishermen of the Cheleken Island, 1900-1910. Source: Gordon Edmondson Private Collection, Vancouver Island University

Book reviews:

Olena Palko, Manuel Ferez (Hg.): Ukraine's Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited, Bielefeld 2023, in: CEU Review of Books, April 2024, https://ceureviewofbooks.com/review/a-bold-new-look-at-ukraines-history-people-and-culture/

Boris Ganichev: Integrating Imperial Space. The Russian Customs System in the 19th Century, Göttingen 2023, in: H-Soz-Kult, 27.10.2023, https://www.hsozkult.de/review/id/reb-135155?title=b-ganichev-integrating-imperial-space