Team
Prof. Dr. Robert Kindler
Robert Kindler is a professor of East European history at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He received his PhD from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin with a dissertation on the history of Stalinism and the disastrous famine in Kazakhstan in the early 1930s. His award-winning book on this topic, Stalins Nomaden (Stalin’s Nomads) has been translated into English, Russian, and Kazakh. His second book, Robbenreich (The Empire of Seals), deals with transnational resource conflicts in the North Pacific. He is currently working on a monograph looking at the history of Kazakhstan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which will appear in 2025.
Visit his full German profile here.
Ruslana Bovhyria
Ruslana Bovhyria is a research associate and lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include the economic and administrative history of Russian imperial rule in its Eastern borderlands, with a focus on Central Asia. Her current doctoral project, tentatively titled “Imperial Economies. Contested Power, Commerce and Private Trade Companies in Central Asia, 1855-1925”, examines Russian colonial practices in the Transcaspian region. Using the case study of commercial shipping on the Caspian and Aral Seas, the project looks closely at the intricate dependencies between issues of imperial expansion, economic competition and infrastructural modernity.
Visit her full German profile here.
Aksana Döge
Aksana Döge runs the Chair‘s secretariat and is eager to help with administrative problems and travel reimbursements.
Visit her full German profile here.
Natasha Klimenko
Natasha Klimenko is an editor, researcher, and writer living in Berlin. Currently, she’s a doctoral fellow at the Global Intellectual History Graduate School at the Freie Universität Berlin, and her first supervisor is Prof. Dr. Robert Kindler at the Institute for East European Studies. Her research looks at the history of concepts, artistic practices and networks, and cultural exchanges in Central Asia, the Soviet Union, and Europe in the twentieth century. She also copyedits academic and nonfiction texts, and writes about art, media, and culture.
Visit her full German profile here.
Aleksandr Korobeinikov
aleksandr.korobeinikov@fu-berlin.de
Aleksandr Korobeinikov is a research associate at the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and a doctoral student in the Department of History at the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna. He has authored multiple articles delving into the history of Sakha intellectuals and their role in shaping the political landscape during the post-imperial transformations of the Yakut (Sakha) region. His current doctoral research project focuses on the different logics of socio-economic imaginations and the role of natural resources in the late imperial, post-imperial, and early Soviet Sakha region.
Visit his full German profile here.
Martin Wagner
Martin Wagner is a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin and a review editor at H-Soz-Kult. He studied history and China studies in Berlin, Beijing, and Moscow, and was a guest researcher at Princeton University and in Hong Kong. Martin holds a PhD in History from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His first monograph, Collective Disciplining,is an entangled comparison of post-totalitarian transformation in the Soviet Union and China. Currently, he is completing a second monograph (co-authored with Sören Urbansky), China und Russland (China and Russia), which considers four hundred years of Sino-Russian relations. His articles have appeared in The American Historical Review and Historische Zeitschrift, among other publications.
Visit his full German profile here.
Aleksandr Zaslavskii
SHK-Geschichte@oei.fu-berlin.de
Aleksandr Zaslavskii is a student assistant helping with technical issues and guest presentations.
Visit his full German profile here.