Postdoctoral Research Fellow GRK-2840Dr. Fabian Baumann
Contact Information
Fabian Baumann
Karl Jaspers Centre
Voßstraße 2, Building 4400
Room 400.00.09
69115 Heidelberg
Germany
+49 (0) 6221 54 4082
fabian.baumann@hcts.uni-heidelberg.de
About
I am a historian of Eastern Europe, with a focus on the history of nationalism and empire in Russia, Ukraine, and East Central Europe. My book Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism was published by NIU Press/Cornell University Press in August 2023. Tracing the story of a family that included both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists, Dynasty Divided analyzes what prompted nineteenth-century intellectuals to identify with either one or another imagined community. I argue that these men and women consciously chose a political position and only then began their self-fashioning as members of a national community, defying the notion of nationalism as a consequence of a pre-existing ethnicity. I have also worked on a postdoctoral research project about “banal” forms of nationalism and the promotion of republican statehood in late Soviet Ukraine.
My current research project aims to study enmities and revisionisms surrounding the First Czechoslovak Republic through the lens of espionage and treason trials. Trials against purported traitors and spies were transnational media spectacles that created an opportunity for societal debates about the meaning of loyalty and enmity towards the republic; they laid bare the anxieties of the state’s defenders and the hopes of its enemies. The research project will shed light on the intertwined dynamics of state-building and enemization on the transnational, national, and regional levels. In doing so, it will contribute to an ongoing reassessment of the region’s only stable democracy that nevertheless exhibited rising authoritarian tendencies and violent tensions.
Curriculum Vitae (Excerpt)
2023- Research Associate, Heidelberg University
2023 SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellow, RECET, University of Vienna
2021–2022 SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellow, University of Chicago
2020–2021 Assistant Lecturer, University of Basel
2020 PhD in East European History, University of Basel (summa cum laude)
2016–2020 SNSF Doc.CH Fellow, University of Basel
2014 M.Phil in Slavonic Studies, University of Oxford
2012 BA in Russian and English Language, Literature, and Civilization, University of Geneva
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Book
Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: NIU Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press 2023).
Articles and Book Chapters
“Hiking Boots and Peasant Shirts: National Science, Self-Fashioning, and the Ukrainophile Tradition of Scholarly Travel”. In Jörn Happel et al., eds., Discovering, Surveying, Ordering: Expeditions in the Long Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2024), 111–139 (with Martin Rohde).
“Vid spivpratsi do konfrontatsiï: Mykhailo Drahomanov, rodyna Shul’ginykh i rozbrat v seredovyshchi kyïvs’koï intelihentsiï,” Spadshchyna: Literaturne dzhereloznavstvo, tekstolohiia 16 (forthcoming).
“Russischer und ukrainischer Nationalismus und die Ursprünge anti-ukrainischer Feindbilder im 19. Jahrhundert“. In: Fraziska Davies, ed., Die Ukraine in Europa: Traum und Trauma einer Nation (Darmstadt: wbg Theiss, 2023), 82–100.
“Between Empires: Ukraine in the Nineteenth Century.” In Olena Palko and Manuel Férez Gil, eds., Ukraine’s Many Faces: Land, People and Culture Revisited (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2023), 83–90.
“Nationality as Choice of Path: Iakov Shul’gin, Dmitrii Pikhno, and the Russian-Ukrainian Crossroads,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 23, no. 4 (2022), 743–771.
“Entre imperios: La Ucrania al siglo XIX.” In Olena Palko and Manuel Férez Gil, eds., Descrubriendo Ucrania: su pueblo, su historia, y su cultura (Beccar, Argentina: Poliedro Editorial de la Universidad de San Isidro, 2022), 36–41.
“Editorial: Revisiting Soviet Modernity in the Non-Russian Periphery.” In: Euxeinos - Culture and Governance in the Black Sea Region 12, no. 34 (2022): 3–14 (with Olena Palko).
“Von Krieg zu Krieg: Historische Ukraineforschung seit 2014,” Osteuropa 72, no. 1–3 (2022): 309–318.
“Dragged into the Whirlwind: The Shul’gin Family, Kievlianin, and Kiev’s Russian Nationalist Movement in 1917.” In Korine Amacher and F. Benjamin Schenk et al., eds., Personal Trajectories in Russia’s War and Revolution (1914–1922). Biographical Itineraries, Individual Experiences, Autobiographical Reflections, Russia’s Great War & Revolution Series 9 (Bloomington: Slavica, 2021), 73–92.
Book Reviews
Review of Anna Veronika Wendland, Befreiungskrieg: Nationsbildung und Gewalt in der Ukraine, H-Soz-Kult, 19 December 2023.
Review of Alexa von Winning, Intimate Empire: The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855–1936, Slavic Review, vol. 82, no. 2, 2023, 533–534.
Review of Andriy Zayarnyuk and Ostap Sereda, The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Ukraine: The Nineteenth Century, Russian Review, vol. 82, no. 3, 2023, 560–61.
Review of John Connelly, From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 70, no. 1–2, 2022, 227–29.
Review of Olena Palko, Making Ukraine Soviet: Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin, History: The Journal of the Historical Association, vol. 107, no. 374, 2022, 188–190.
Review of Stephan Rindlisbacher and Dimitri Tolkatsch (eds.), Die heutige Ukraine und ihre sowjetischen Wurzeln, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 69, no. 4, 2021, 697–700.
Review of Trevor Erlacher, Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes. An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Dontsov, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 69, no. 4, 2021, 676–678.
Review of Serhiy Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905, East/West Journal of Ukrainian Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2019, 231–233.
Media
“New Books Network History Ex Silo Podcast: The Family in History, History in the Family. National Identity in Nineteenth-century Kyiv and Immigration Politics in West Germany after 1955,” 21 October 2023.
“Ukraine in Rot. Imperiales Gewaltregime und Institutionalisierung der ukrainischen Nation,” Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West 9 (2023), 11–14.
“Ein Keil geht durch die Kiewer Familie,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 19 August 2023, 44–45.
“Choosing Ukrainian, then and now,” Eurozine, 8 May 2023.
“Das Märchen vom Marionettenstaat,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 13 April 2023, 32.
“Transformative Podcast, Episode 34 with Fabian Baumann: Banal Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine,” 20 April 2023.
“Ein Folterlager im heutigen Europa,” Republik, 3 January 2023.
“Im Grenzland der Geschichte,” Republik, 12 September 2022.
“‘Anti-Russland’? Die Ukraine als politisches Projekt,” Geschichte der Gegenwart, 6 April 2022.
“Die innere Logik des Krieges,” Die Wochenzeitung, 31 March 2022, 10.
“Einseitiger Einheitswunsch – Putins neueste Geschichtslektion,” Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West 9 (2021), 3–5.
“Als Genf die Hauptstadt der Ukraine war,” NZZ Geschichte 1 (2021), 87–95.
“Geschichtspolitik mit dem Holzhammer,” Geschichte der Gegenwart, 7 December 2016.