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Internship at Columbia University
Marharyta Fabrykant, Associate Researcher at the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LSCR), who studies nationalist views of justice, recently returned following a four-month internship at Columbia University (New York, USA). She spoke with us about her internship.
Richard Wortman, professor at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, agreed to become my supervisor for the internship after I met him at a German Historical Institute conference in Moscow. He is one of the world’s most frequently cited experts on the history of the Russian Empire.
Thanks to Professor Wortman, I was not only able to work in the Columbia University library, but also to talk to more experienced colleagues. Participants in his regular seminar (where I had the opportunity to speak about my research) impressed me both with their critical approach to discussing various papers, and with their sincere friendliness and knowledge on my rather specific topic. Professor Alexander Motyl, a renowned researcher of nationalism, allowed me to attend his course on Soviet and post-Soviet studies. He also gave an interview for H-Nationalism, an academic social network.
When preparing for the trip, I applied to four conferences and, surprisingly, was invited to all of them. I participated in the annual Miami University Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies conference, which this year was dedicated to the studies of justice. The ‘Russia, in Theory’ conference, which took place at the University of Pennsylvania in March 2014, discussed various aspects of empirical studies of Russian identity. My paper looked at how Russian identity is represented in the social imagery of Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania. At a conference on Eastern European and Eurasian mass movements, which took place at Rutgers University, participants were more interested in explanatory models than methods. A day before that I spoke at an event by Skype for the first time – a onference dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty organized by the European University in St. Petersburg.
The largest conference took place during the week before the last week of my internship. I had long dreamed of taking part in the Annual Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) Convention. During this event, I had two roles. First, I chaired a session on culture and national identity in Russia. Second, at a session on historical memory, a colleague from Minnesota and I presented a paper on disputed medieval heritage in modern Eastern European nationalist narratives. I was impressed by the number of participants who came to both sessions – on Friday and Saturday they started at 9 am! – and by the quality of their comments.
I saw further evidence that studying nationalism is not only popular, but also very difficult. Large audiences and queues of people who wanted to ask questions to the speaker near the microphone showed me what the mysterious ‘academic atmosphere’ means in everyday university life. However, for the time being my task is to finish my papers and publish them.