The Early Slavic Studies Association (ESSA) is launching the first lecture of its lecture series. The inaugural speaker will be Valerie Kivelson, from the University of Michigan.
Valerie A. Kivelson will deliver a talk titled “Rethinking ‘the Political’ in Muscovy: A Historiographic Provocation” on Monday, June 22 at 11:00am EST.
If you are interested, please register at https://essa-kivelson.eventbrite.com/.
The Lecture Series Host is Dr. Václav Algirdas Zheng (Johns Hopkins University)
Please also look forward to our second inaugural talk in mid-September. The speaker will be Tomasz Grusiecki, from Queen’s University, who will give a talk tentatively titled “The Last Aurochs: Zoopolitics, Memorialization, and Early Modern Extinction” (date and time TBA).
Rethinking “the Political” in Muscovy: A Historiographic Provocation, June 22, 2026, 11am-12:30pm (EST)
Over the past fifty years, historical understandings of the nature of “the political” and of what constitutes political engagement have widened. Paradigm-shifting studies have explored the hidden politics of gender, the disruptive politics of foot-dragging and mockery, the radical politics of faith. Participating fully in that move, scholars in the Early Slavic field have inventively broadened approaches to the political, particularly with studies of kinship, gender, and religion.
And yet, the constrictive definitions of an earlier era persist. Recent works still apply received ideas about what counts as political thought or political activity, ideas derived from an established canon of western political theorists. My talk challenges those conventions and encourages ways of broadening our definitions as a way to detect political engagements expressed in other registers. Drawing on Muscovite petitions and magical spells, I point to conceptions of and engagement with power that more classical approaches overlook, dismiss, or silence. We can do better than compare our regions with an idealized Western Europe and find it wanting. Rather than imposing pre-fabricated definitions, we can listen to the alternatives reverberating in our sources.
Speaker: Dr. Valerie A. Kivelson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History and Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor at University of Michigan. She is a world-renowned scholar of early modern Russia and the author of
- Images and the Making of the Russian Empire, 1471-1721(Bloomsbury, 2025)
- Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Cornell, 2013)
- Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Cornell, 2007)
- Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, 1996)
- She is co-author of Russia’s Empires (Oxford, 2017)
She is co-editor of several collections and several Festschrifts and sourcebooks, e.g.:
- Picturing Russian Empire (Oxford, 2023)
- Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (Yale, 2008)
- Orthodox Russia Belief and Practice Under the Tsars (Penn State, 2003),
