On 7 May at 16:15 (Jakobi 2-224), Matthias Battis will talk about "The uses and abuses of Soviet Orientalism in Central Asia". The lecture will be held in English. Everybody interested in the topic is welcome.
The talk explores the relationship between Orientalist knowledge and state power in late imperial and Soviet Central Asia. Drawing on extensive archival research in Tajikistan, it asks what microhistory and biography and the career of the colonial administrator-cum-Soviet Orientalist Aleksandr Semenov (1873-1958) can tell us about that relationship and its impact on imperial and national projects in Central Asia.
Matthias Battis is currently a postdoc at the Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. A historian of late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union with a particular interest in Persianate Central Asia, his research combines microhistory, biography and the history of ideas to deal with the entangled history of empire, nationalism and socialism in Central and Eastern Europe and Persianate Eurasia during the late 19th and 20th centuries.
The event is part of International History Seminars, and is guided by the motto: “national history cannot be understood without the framework of international history” (Hans Rothfels, “Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1, 1953).
