Mark Bassin came to Södertörns Högskola in 2010. He is affiliated with the Center for Baltic and East European Studies and the Department of the History of Ideas.

Mark received his doctoral degree, in the fields of historical geography and Russian intellectual history, from the University of California-Berkeley. He has had permanent teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University College London, and the University of Birmingham. He has also had visiting appointments at UCLA, the University of Chicago, University of Copenhagen, University of Pau, and the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw. He has been awarded numerous research grants (Fulbright-Hays Foundation, the British Academy, DAAD, NEH, Baltic Sea Foundation) and has also received distinguished personal fellowships (Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, the Remarque Institute at New York University, the American Academy in Berlin, the Leverhulme Trust in the UK, and the Institut für europäische Geschichte in Mainz, Slavic Research Center in Hokkaido).

Mark's research focuses on intellectual history in East and Central Europe, primarily Russia and Germany. He is interested in issues of identity, politics and ideologies in the 19th and 20th centuries. With a strong academic background in the field of human geography, he looks particularly at the spatial dimension of identity formation and negotiation. He has done considerable work on the problem of Russia's position between Europe and Asia in Russian cultural history, and also on the vision of Mittellage in German debates about their national destiny in the 20th century. More recently, he has also investigated the question of nature and identity in Russia, looking at how landscapes were represented in the Socialist- Realist art of the Stalin period. He is particularly interested in how space has been theorized in political systems and ideologies, and has done considerable work on the history and concepts of Geopolitik or geopolitics, in Germany and across Europe.

Currently, Mark is completing a monograph analyzing the ideas and reception of the Soviet historian and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev. Additionally, in 2012 he was awarded a major 3-year grant from the Baltic Sea Foundation to lead a research team examining neo-Eurasianism in contemporary Russia. More information on this project is available here.