Research Projects and Work in Progress
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1. Russia's Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922: The Centennial Reappraisal
This project aims to provide a comprehensive scholarly reappraisal of Russia's world-changing experience of war and revolution between 1914 and the early 1920s. Co-organised by Tony Heywood with Dr John Steinberg (Georgia Southern University), it involves a team of over 40 leading British, American, Russian and other historians, and is likely to have contributions from at least 200 scholars worldwide. We expect that it will be the foremost international scholarly project to mark the centenary of the 1917 Russian revolutions.
Contact: Tony Heywood
2. Patrick Gordon's Diary
The significance of the Diary of Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries, 1635-1699, has long been recognised, especially for the history of Russia but also for that of East Europe and Great Britain. Surprisingly, excerpts only have appeared in the original language, but the first of the six volumes comprising the whole work was published in 2009, following the transcription made by Dr Dmitry Fedosov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who is responsible for an ongoing scholarly translation into Russian.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/patrickgordonvolumeone.shtml
Contact: Paul Dukes
3. The Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385-1815
Political unions bring peoples together by institutionalising diversity. Yet historians have often regarded them with suspicion, since they complicate the supposedly simple process of the ‘rise of the nation state’. Although, in the age of devolution, Britons have become increasingly aware that the United Kingdom is a political union, there is less awareness that Britain’s experience is by no means unique: Unions were common in European history; some ephemeral, others more durable. This project looks at a successful political union which lasted longer (to date) than the Anglo-Scottish Union, and was ended forcibly, without the consent of its citizens. Initiated as a loose dynastic union, by 1600 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had evolved into the most radically consensual political system in Europe, which sought to encompass religious, cultural and national diversity within a parliamentary system. Its initial success and ultimate failure reveal much about the possibilities and problems of political union.
Contact: Robert Frost
4. Famine and the Grand Duchy of Finland, 1855-1870
Finland suffered Europe's last major peace-time subsistence crisis in 1868, the final event in a series of famines which afflicted both Finland and neighbouring Sweden in the 1850s and 60s. The significance of this study is in its provision of a 'new' history of the Finnish and Swedish famines, the primary innovation to place these catastrophes in a comparative context alongside the Irish and Highland famines of the 1840s. The project will make a considerable impact on the historiographies of Finland and Sweden (Irish historian Cormac ó Grada recently described the Finnish famine of 1868 as 'unduly neglected') but its comparative approach will also shed new light on the famines of the 1840s in Ireland and Highland Scotland.
The project will examine political relationships between 'core' and 'periphery', and the provision of state / private relief in these countries: in Sweden, this might mean between state and 'folk', but especially between Stockholm and the rest of the country, including Swedish Lapland. In Finland, part of the Russian Empire from 1809, there is a further dichotomy: the authorities in Helsinki and regional capitals were attempting to relieve large sections of the country, but the relationship of the imperial capital to these relief efforts must also be considered. As the Finns sought to maintain control over their autonomous economic policy, there was a desire to involve St. Petersburg as little as possible in social policy.
Contact: Andrew Newby
5. The Photographs of Engineer Iu.V. Lomonosov
Iurii Lomonosov (1876-1952), one of Russia's most important railway engineers, left a collection of some 6,000 photographic negatives and prints which is now preserved at the Leeds Russian Archive, University of Leeds. Most of the photographs were taken by Lomonosov between about 1902, when he acquired his first camera, and the early 1950s. Approximately two thirds of the collection relates to his life and work up to 1927, when he left Soviet government service and became, in effect, an exile in the West. In terms of images relating to Russian and Soviet railways this collection is one of the most important outside Russia, but it also includes several thousand non-railway images from Russia, Western Europe and North America.
This project involves sorting the negatives into a single coherent sequence, after which they will be digitally copied and made available for public use.
The digitisation process is being funded by a private donor who wishes to remain anonymous but whose support is very gratefully acknowledged here.
Contact: Tony Heywood
6. The German-Polish borderlands in the early modern period
Borders in the early modern period had a mobile quality, which was hardly compatible with modern enthusiasm for measuring and statistics. The borderline under scrutiny in this research project is between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire, more specifically between Wielkopolska, Pomerania and Neumark, and the border between Royal and Ducal Prussia, which has received relatively little attention for the period before the first partition of Poland in 1772. A mixture of languages, religions and national identities characterised these borders as a typical zone of fracture between German and Slavic cultures, which modern historians of the modern nation-state find unnecessarily messy and unstable.
Yet life on the Polish-Prussian border reflected more than a linear rise and decline of central statehood. Border societies adapted to different types of competition for resources, and reacted differently to attempts by the centre to impose a sovereign agenda, which frequently clashed with local needs and priorities. It is this history of conflict, but also of cohabitation and cooperation, which raises new questions and issues about local and regional decision-making, delegation and political autonomy, which are still relevant to life on the border today.
In future conferences and symposia, comparisons with other European border zones will be explored to contextualise this East Central European case study. A proposal for a research network, in cooperation with Polish and german colleagues, the invitation of visiting scholars, and possibly the creation of a post-doc position are part of the larger research plan.
Contact: Karin Friedrich