University of Tartu scholar received an ERC grant to study the history of solidarities across the Romanov Empire
Catherine Gibson, Lecturer in East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Tartu, has received the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant of €1.5 million to study flows of charitable donations that connected people living in different parts of the Romanov Empire. By studying the history of how solidarities emerged and developed, her project will provide a critical backdrop through which we can better understand geographies of solidarity in the contemporary world.
By the late nineteenth century, the Romanov Empire stretched half-way across the globe, turning inhabitants of the land mass reaching from today’s Tallinn to Vladivostok into subjects of one and the same empire. Yet, how far did the inhabitants’ geographical horizons of sympathy extend? Did people living at opposite ends of the empire feel any emotional connection or impulse to help one another in times of need? If so, how were these solidarities enacted and expressed through ideas, emotions, and lived experiences?
Gibson’s project – “Empire of solidarities: a connected history of private charity across a decentred Romanov Empire, 1855–1914” – seeks to redefine conventional centre-periphery approaches to studying empires by recovering horizontal threads connecting regions traditionally studied separately from one another. By analysing little-known cases of intra-imperial charity, aid, and disaster relief, such as Estonian peasants collecting donations to help victims of an earthquake in Semirechye (today’s Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan), the project investigates how solidarities were both shaped by, and could also overcome, confessional and ethnolinguistic differences.
In doing so, the project contributes a long-overdue, decentring perspective to critical approaches to East European and Eurasian studies and imperial history, which has become especially urgent following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “As a result of the current inaccessibility of the empire’s central archives in Russia to foreign researchers, it is imperative that we now develop new methodological approaches for working with historical sources that are available to us,“ Gibson explained. The project aspires to open and intensify cross-regional networks and partnerships between various sub-fields of scholars working on regional histories of the Romanov Empire (Baltic Studies, Ukrainian Studies, Caucasus Studies, Central Asian Studies) to generate new narratives about the empire’s history based on entanglements between its border regions. It approaches solidarity as not only a research topic, but also as a scholarly working practice through modelling new, collaborative ways of writing histories that transcend the traditional confines of national and regional borders.
The project will be based at the Centre for Eurasian and Russian Studies (CEURUS) at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies and run from 2025 to 2029. In addition to Gibson, three postdoctoral research fellows and a doctoral student will be recruited to join the team to tackle these ambitious questions with a breadth of geographical expertise. Over the course of 5 -years, the project will trace the conceptual history of solidarity in the Romanov Empire, gather and analyse examples of grassroots private charitable initiatives across four imperial border regions, and digitally map flows and networks of donations to generate insights into larger trends and spatial patterns in charitable practices.
Catherine Gibson is a lecturer at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies of the University of Tartu and her research to date has focused on the history of nationalism and science in Eastern Europe. She is author of the book Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (Oxford University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 University of Cambridge Baltic Geopolitics Network Publication Prize, and the leading organiser of the annual Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies.
The ERC is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. The 2024 Starting Grant competition attracted 3,474 proposals. Overall, 14.2% of the proposals were selected for funding.
