Dear Students, Faculty and Staff of the Department of History,
We are continuing our departmental tradition of organizing bi-weekly research seminars. In these seminars, professors and researchers provide insights into their current work.
Tuesday, on May 25th, 5:30 PM, CET we will have an interesting lecture by Sören Urbansky.
All members of the department are strongly encouraged to participate,
Tijana Rupčić and Matthias Riedl
For the zoom link, please RSVP to rupcic_tijana@phd.ceu.edu
Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian border
Speaker: Sören Urbansky is the head of the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC at UC Berkeley and Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History at CEU.
Abstract: The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, was special in many ways. It not only divided the two largest Eurasian empires, it was also the place where European and Asian civilizations met, where nomads and sedentary people mingled, where the imperial interests of Russia and later the Soviet Union clashed with those of Qing and Republican China and Japan, and where the world’s two largest Communist regimes hailed their friendship and staged their enmity. In this talk, Sören Urbansky will discuss his recent book, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian border, which examines the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards.
Bio: Sören Urbansky is a historian of Russia and China in the modern era, specializing in imperial and racial entanglements, migration, infrastructure, and the history of borders. He is the head of the Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington DC at UC Berkeley and Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History at CEU. Sören is the author of three monographs, including Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).