CPS Lecture: Valerie Kivelson

Title: "Racial Imaginaries in Early Modern Russia: Images of Mongols and Tatars"

Abstract: Theorists of race often assert that race is a modern invention and that we are imposing modern categories when we attempt to find race in pre-modern history. But racial theory tends to draw on European and American historical experiences and encounters with the rest of the world. Early Modern Russia, developing quite apart from its European contemporaries, offers a kind of controlled experiment. Visual records of encounters with Mongols and Tatars provide valuable insights into ways that Russians imagined their neighbors to the east.

Bio: Valerie Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Her publications include Russia’s Empires, coauthored with Ronald G. Suny; Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia; and Witchcraft in Early Modern & Modern Russia and Ukraine: A Sourcebook, translated and edited with Christine D. Worobec.

Cosponsored by the Department of History.

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