Please join us for this international workshop, organized by Gulnar Kendirbai.
The centenary of the Russian Revolution provides an opportunity to revisit the advent of Russian modernity as it spanned a wide spectrum of social groups, including enlightened bureaucrats, colonial administrators, political exiles, orientalists and literati, as well as students, women and other educated segments of Russian society. Discourses of modernity stemming from the late imperial period, to which members of these groups contributed, strongly resonated with their successors who operated in the early decades of the Soviet regime.
The workshop brings scholars from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss various groups of Russian imperial society, whose members strongly resonated with the advent of modernity in late imperial Russia, including the Muslim/Jadid reformists. A multifaceted exploration of Russian modernity and its repercussions has been gaining in significance in our time, as we witness the growing alienation between Russia and the West, on the one hand, and the repeated explosions of Islamic militant extremism and fanaticism, on the other.