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REEEC NTS VORL Series

REEEC Noontime Scholars Lecture: Felix Cowan, "Narratives of Backwardness and Modernization in the Late Imperial Russian Penny Press"

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
REEEC
Date
Mar 2, 2021   12:00 pm  
Speaker
Felix Cowan (PhD Candidate in History, University of Illinois)
Cost
Free and open to the public.
Registration
Registration
Contact
REEEC
E-Mail
reec@illinois.edu
Views
95
Originating Calendar
Russian, E. European & Eurasian Center: Speakers

In the final years of the Russian Empire, debates over Russia's "backwardness" could be found throughout the public sphere. Russia's kopeck newspapers, the empire's most popular press outlets, regularly examined "backwardness" in comparative perspective, relating perceptions of Russian underdevelopment to perceptions of Western modernity in every aspect of life. In the process, they constructed a civilizational hierarchy and a fixed path of progress in which development depended on imitating Western modernity. This talk explores how late imperial Russia's kopeck newspapers constructed images of Russian backwardness and Western modernity, and how they instrumentalized those images to argue that Russia's future lay in imitating the West.

Felix Cowan is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Illinois.

Please register for this lecture at https://go.illinois.edu/cowan-lecture

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