CBEES Advanced Seminar with Fabian Baumann, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University. 

Speaker: Fabian Baumann, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University.

Discussant: Per Bolin, Professor of History, Södertörn University and Director of the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University.

Chair: Julia Malitska, Project Researcher at the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies and Research Coordinator at the CBEES, Södertörn University.

Abstract: Dynasty Divided uses the story of a prominent Kievan family of journalists, scholars, and politicians to analyze the emergence of rivaling nationalisms in nineteenth-century Ukraine, the most pivotal borderland of the Russian Empire. The Shul'gins identified as Russians and defended the tsarist autocracy; the Shul'hyns identified as Ukrainians and supported peasant-oriented socialism. Fabian Baumann shows how 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 direct consequence of ethnicity.

Baumann asks what made individuals into determined nationalists in the first place, revealing the close link to private lives, including intimate family dramas and scandals. He looks at how nationalism emerged from domestic spaces, and how women played an important (if often invisible) role in fin-de-siècle politics. Dynasty Divided explains how nineteenth-century Kievans cultivated their national self-images and how, by the twentieth century, Ukraine steered away from Russia. The two branches of this family of Russian nationalists and Ukrainian nationalists epitomize the struggles for modern Ukraine.

Fabian Baumann is a historian of Eastern Europe with a focus on the history of nationalism and empire in Ukraine, Russia, and East Central Europe. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Basel in 2020 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and the University of Vienna before joining Heidelberg University as a research associate in 2023. His book Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism, published by Cornell University Press, was awarded the 2024 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize for an author’s first published monograph of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past. He is now working on a new project about treason trials and disloyalty in interwar Czechoslovakia.