Programme Overview

This two-year course grounds students in the vibrant field of global history through a regional focus on Russian, former Soviet and Eurasian spaces.

• How do these area studies benefit from the global history paradigm and its key current debates?
• How does in turn its classic problematic of modern empires and critiques of Eurocentrism benefit from Eurasian regional material and the emerging engagement with the questions of the anthropocene, histories of gender and economy, studies of science and technology, and religion and secularism?
• How does global history balance historians’ fundamental commitment to exploring history from below and the emphasis on translocal and global interconnections and hierarchies?

These questions underpin this programme’s core seminars in theory and methodology as well as a broad array of regional courses. These range from the history of St Petersburg to that of personality cults of the 20th century, the Cold War, Imperial crossroads in northern Eurasia, the Caucasus, Central and Eastern Europe, the Arctic as well as Russian/Soviet links with Africa, Asia, Latin America.

The programme draws on the proximity and wealth of archives and museum collections of St Petersburg and the diversity of its rich environs. Its students benefit from the ease of travel to Moscow, Finland, the Baltics and multiple regional locations within Russia. The teaching is cutting-edge international research-led and based in HSE St Petersburg excellence in history and anthropology.