Postdoctoral Fellowships

Cleto Junior Pinto de Abreu earned his dissertation in 2021 at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and joined the Centre for Historical Research in 2023. His research focuses on the anthropology of religion, with a particular emphasis on Brazilian evangelicals. His Ph.D. thesis explored how Protestant organizations became involved in philanthropic work to combat poverty and expanded their influence in the public sphere through various strategies, including the development of networks alongside churches and the creation of a civic language for their missionaries.

Daria Tereshina was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Historical Research in 2023-24. Her doctoral thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany, focused on the study of moral economy of family businesses in Russia, based on a year of fieldwork conducted in Smolensk. The research unpacks the values, moral ideas and sentiments that underlie the everyday workings of small family-based enterprises. Currently Daria is continuing her investigation into family businesses, focusing on how an engagement in these enterprises affects the local constructions of kinship relatedness and belonging in Russia, in the framework of the Centre's project "Economic anthropology of household in contemporary Russia outside metropolitan areas" funded by the RSF.

Mikhail Belan joined the Centre for Historical Research in 2023. His research focuses on the interactions between urban commoner social groups such as merchants and meshchane, their political intstitutes (dumas and magistrates), the state agents (the ministries, central and local authorities), and the military in the towns of the Russian Northwest (St. Petersburg, Novgorod provinces) in the period of the Napoleonic Wars (1790s-1810s) and after it. He earned his Candidate of Historical Sciences degree from the Lomonosov MSU and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Oxford.

Ksenia Rodionova joined the Centre for Historical Research in 2023. Her dissertation, defended at the Far Eastern Federal University in 2022, focused on the religious minorities of Harbin in the Far East. Ksenia aimed to highlight the confessional diversity of the region at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as to examine the regulatory measures imposed by the authorities. Her work was recognized as the best research in the field of Religious Studies by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie and later published under the title "Harbin. Faith and Alienation: Christian Minorities of the Northeastern Russian Diaspora" (M.: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2024).

Pietro Shakarian joined the Centre for Historical Research in 2022 as a part of the HSE University postdoctoral fellowship programme in Global Histories of Empire. He earned his Ph.D. in History at The Ohio State University. He previously worked as a lecturer in history at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan. Pietro is currently focused on expanding his Ph.D. dissertation into a full-fledged monograph. The work, entitled An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin, explores the major role of Anastas Mikoyan in Soviet nationality policy reform and de-Stalinization during the era of Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw. The study is based on extensive archival research, drawing on materials in both the Russian and Armenian languages from various archives in Moscow and Yerevan.
Pietro Shakarian in the research seminar of the Center for Historical Research

Aleksandra Kasatkina joined the Centre for Historical Research in 2021 after finishing a postdoctoral program in the University of Zürich. She defended her dissertation on the ethnography of Russian dacha talks in 2019 in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences. Her research interests lie in the field of linguistic anthropology, performativity and polyphony of communication, specifically in research interviews. Aleksandra is currently developing two research projects: semiotic approach to the late Soviet bureaucratic documents and contemporary Russian household economies in the mirror of oral communication. Her recent publications appeared in Laboratorium and Etnograficheskoe obozrenie.

Xenia Cherkaev joined the Centre for Historical Research in 2020. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and is working on two projects: one about the customary use-rights inherent in socialist property law; another about the Soviet and Russian governance of domestic animals. Her essays and articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, Environmental Humanities, Cahiers du mode russe, NLO, Ab Imperio, Sotsiologia Vlasti, Anthropology and Humanism, and the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s editor-invited “Fieldsights” section.
Working at the Center for Historical Research in the pandemic: Nadezhda Tikhonova and Xenia Cherkaev share their experience; Center for Historical Research welcomes new postdocs for 2020/21 academic season

Nadezhda Tikhonova joined the Centre for Historical Researchin September 2020 as a part of the HSE University Russian postdoctoral fellowship programme. In 2019 she successfully defended her PhD thesis “The Crimean Tatar ‘Perevodchik-Terjiman’ newspaper and its role in Russia’s political and ethnocultural discourse in the 1880s-1910s”. Nadezhda was working on the project “Post-imperial diversities: majority-minority relations in the transition from empire to nation-states”. Her working languages are Russian, English, German, Turkish and Turki.
Working at the Center for Historical Research in the pandemic: Nadezhda Tikhonova and Xenia Cherkaev share their experience; Center for Historical Research welcomes new postdocs for 2020/21 academic season
Key publications:

Tikhonova, N. The “Perevodchik-Terjiman” newspaper: a bilingual phenomenon of the Muslim press in late imperial Russia // Praktyka teoretyczna. 2021. Vol. 1. No. 39. P. 89-106.

Ksenia Maksimovtsova joined the Center for Historical Research in September 2019 where she was working on the project "Post-Imperial Diversities. A Relationship between Majority and Minorities". In May 2018 she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, Germany. Her book "Language Conflicts in Contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine. A Comparative Analysis of Public Debates in Post-Soviet Russian-Language Digital Media", which appeared out of her dissertation in May 2019, presents a cross-cultural qualitative and quantitative analysis of publications in leading Russian-language blogs and news websites of these three post-Soviet states during the period of 2004–2017.
What Does It Mean to Be a Postdoc at HSE? Experience of Ksenia Maksimovtsova?
Key publications:

Maksimovtsova, K. (2019) Language Conflicts in Contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine. A Comparative Exploration of Discourses in Post-Soviet Russian-Language Digital Media, Stuttgart, Ibidem-Verlag.
Maksimovtsova, K. (2019) ‘Ukrainian vs. Russian? The Securitization of Language-Related Issues in Ukrainian Blogs and on News Websites’, East European Politics and Societies. doi: 10.1177/0888325419870235.
Ksenia Maksimovtsova's book about language conflicts in Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine is published

Currently Ksenia is working on the research article on how a relationship between the "titular majority" and minorities was formed in Ukraine at the moment of the break-up of the Soviet Union. She analyses the main points of public discussions surrounding the adoption of the language law in 1989 and the Constitution of Ukraine in 1996. Her publications also include articles and chapters in edited volumes where she analyses the current state of affairs in language policy in Ukraine and the Baltic countries.

Wiktor Marzec joined the Centre for Historical Research in 2018 after earning his PhD at the University Budapest. With his research topic "The Revolution That Did Not Happen. Rebellion and Reaction in the Post-Imperial Borderlands 1905-1921: Poland and Finland in Asymmetrical Comparison" he became an indispensible staff member of the ERA.Net project "Post-imperial diversity".
Wiktor Marzec in the research seminar of the Center for Historical Research
Wiktor on his research project:

The Revolution That Did Not Happen. Rebellion and Reaction in the Post-Imperial Borderlands 1905-1921: Poland and Finland in Asymmetrical Comparison
I investigate rebellion and reaction in the post-imperial borderlands between 1905 and 1921. Comparing Poland, Finland and other borderland regions of the Russian Empire I ask about revolutions that succeeded, failed or did not happen at all against the backdrop of nation building and state-crafting in the region. Russian Poland was among the most militant tsarist borderlands during the 1905-1907 Revolution. Harboring long-lasting strikes and breeding bellicose street fighters, Poland witnessed an unprecedented political upheaval manifest in the emergence of mass parties, labor unions and a new public culture. However, only a decade later, when revolutionary movements again loomed large and shook the whole region, Poland remained relatively calm. Forging a new statehood rivaled the earlier popular drive toward social revolution. Despite the Bolsheviks’ march on Warsaw to spread the socialist revolution westwards, the popular mood stuck with national unity. Polish popular classes stood almost unanimously on the side of the Polish nation state, even after it failed to deliver its promise to be a socialist-leaning one. What then were the processes responsible for the withering-away of social-revolutionary tendencies? The project is an asymmetrical comparison of the Polish rebellion, nationalist re-mobilization, and eventual integration of the subaltern classes, with other revolutionary sequences ending in distinct outcomes. The analysis of ideological landscapes will explain the occurring divergences. I will analyze sources on political languages as newspapers and pamphlets against the backdrop of sources documenting social unrest. Deftly integrating historical sociology, conceptual history and historical discourse analysis, my work addresses the entanglement of structural factors and intellectual transformations in political process in highly interdependent trans-national context.

Key publications:
Marzec W. Repertoires of Industrial Conflict in a Modern City. Łódź, Central Poland 1861-1921 //  Labor History . 2019 doi
Marzec W., Turunen R.  ‘Social-isms in the Tsarist Borderlands. Poland and Finland in a Contrastive Comparison 1830–1907’ //  Contributions to the History of Concepts.  2018. Vol. 113. No. 1. P. 22-50.

Dominic Martin joined HSE as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Historical Research in 2017 and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (UK). His PhD was based on more than a year's worth of ethnographic and archival research on Old Believers in Russia’s Far East. During his postdoctoral fellowship at HSE, Dominic was focused on two research projects: firstly, on the current descendants of Old Believers, who lived in Manchukuo in the 1930s and 1940s; and, secondly, on the post-Soviet revival of Cossackdom.
Being a postdoc at HSE Center for Historical Research: Dominic A. Martin
Dominic A. Martin. Loyal to god: Old Believers, oaths and orders // History and Anthropology. 2017. Vol. 28. No. 4. P. 477-496.

Anton Kotenko received his PhD in 2014 from University in Budapest, where he defended his doctoral dissertation “The Ukrainian project in search of national space, 1861–1914.” In 2014 - 2017 Anton was a Junior Research Fellow at the Centre, and was working on turning the dissertation into a book. His academic interests include history of European modernity, nationalism and science in the nineteenth – first half of the twentieth century.
Kotenko A. Imagining Modern Ukraїnica // Ab imperio. 2015. No. 1. P. 519-526.

Gayle Lonergan earned her PhD at the University of Oxford in 2010 with a doctoral thesis dealing with the Russian Civil War: "The Paper Communists: the Party and Peasantry in the Russian Civil War (1918-1921)". She joined the Center for Historical Research as Junior Research Fellow.
Lonergan G. Where Was the Conscience of the Revolution? The Military Opposition at the Eighth Party Congress (March 1919) // Slavic Review. Vol. 74. No. 4 (Winter 2015). P. 832-849.

Tanya Zaharchenko joined the Center for Historical Research as Junior Research Fellow. She earned her PhD in Slavonic Studies in 2014 at the University of Cambridge with a thesis on collective post-soviet memory in the contemporary literature of Eastern Ukraine and the borderlands, specifically in the city of Kharkiv with its hybrid identity. Her Master thesis dealing with oppositional trends within the Russian rock music was defended in 2007 at the University of Oxford.