Dr Dina Gusejnova

About me

Dina Gusejnova (PhD in History, University of Cambridge) is Associate Professor in International History at 杏吧论坛. Her research interests include modern European political, intellectual and cultural history of transitional periods, especially the revolutions of 1918-20 and the two World Wars. She is currently working on a cultural and intellectual history of forced displacement and internment in the Second World War.

Dina Gusejnova’s first major research project dealt with ideas of European integration after the First World War. In (Cambridge University Press, 2016, pbk 2018), she reconstructs the intellectual lifeworld of three fading empires, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, through the eyes of a group of German-speaking authors whose social lives traversed the three societies. The book maps out how ideas of Europe emerged in response to the decline of the continental empires.

In her subsequent research, Dina has concentrated on connections between cosmopolitan thought and war. In this context, she has recently edited Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which was the outcome of an international collaboration involving authors from the UK, the United States, Turkey and Russia. Revisiting the cultural history of global conflicts from the Seven Years’ War to the Cold War, they show how cosmopolitan ideas have been implicated not only in practices and legal justifications of war but also in personal experiences of conflict.

Further research has centred on German intellectual history in global contexts, as well as the history of critical and social theory. Her articles in this field, including work on authors such as Ernst Cassirer, Oswald Spengler, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Weber, appeared in the Journal of European Studies, Cultural History, Comparativ, the Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte (Journal of World History), Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, and European Journal of Social Theory, and with , and the .

More recently, Dina Gusejnova has been thinking about history in a more diverse range of media, focusing on forms ranging from dialogue and conversation to video essays. She is the co-host of the podcast , which explores topical issues from a historical perspective with one or two invited guests. She has also contributed a feature to , and made independent documentary films in an essay format. One film explores about European identity and colonial legacies, , another film, called , looks at the impact of 1933 on the discipline of intellectual history, and most recently she has completed a documentary essay about the impossibility of telling the history of the 20th century in the Russian state historical museum, called .

Biography

Dr Gusejnova holds a BA, MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she taught the history of political thought. She was also awarded a European Doctorate from the Marie Curie consortium supported by the European Commission. After receiving a Harper-Schmidt postdoctoral fellowship from the Society of Fellows, she taught social and political theory in Chicago as Collegiate Assistant Professor. Dr Gusejnova has also held postdoctoral awards from the AHRC, the DAAD and the Leverhulme Trust. Having taught at UCL and

Queen Mary University of London, in 2015 she took up a lectureship at the University of Sheffield. Dr Gusejnova joined the 杏吧论坛 in September 2019.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy, as well as an Honorary Research Associate of the Centre for Transnational History at UCL and the History Department at the University of Sheffield. She serves as Historical advisor to the ‘Imagining History’ programme for young writers led by the . Dina is one of the co-conveners of the , and a co-PI on two CIVICA research projects, Protecting Academics at Risk: A Survey of European and EU Practice (PROAC), and Democracy and Its Discontents. A Historical Examination of the Current Predicament of Democracy (DEMOS). She is one of the co-founders of the , a collective of academics who seek to facilitate new ways of researching and teaching European history and politics from a global perspective involving academics at risk from war and political persecution.

VIDEO: Watch Dr Dina Guesjnova talk about her historical research on .

How did the idea of the state change over the course of the 20th century? And what did people do with these changing ideas?

Expertise Details

Modern European History; Intellectual and Cultural History; History and Social Theory

Dr Dina Gusejnova teaches the following courses in the Department:

At undergraduate level:

HY332 - Interwar Worlds: The Cultural Consequences of the First World War (Suspended)

At postgraduate level:

HY4B3: Citizenship in 20th century political thought: intellectual history in case studies

She also supervises the following students:

Research student	Provisional thesis title
Ryoya Mizuno	The International Thought of Arnold J. Toynbee: The Decline of the West and the End of the British Imperial System
Edoardo Vaccari	Socialism and the Making of Europe: ‘Third Force’ Socialists in the European project (1932-1951)

Books

(Cambridge University Press, 2016, pbk 2018, Open Access)
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Articles

'', The Historical Journal, (2023), 1-23.
'', History of European Ideas, 46:5 (2020), 697-714
'', Global Intellectual History (2020), online access.
‘’, Turkish Journal of Sociology, 38:2 (2018), 227-253.
‘’, European Journal of Social Theory (July 2018).
‘’, in Cultural History, 5:1 (April 2016), 26-50.
‘’, in Comparativ, 2 (October 2015), 29-45, reviewed .
‘’ [‘The Prophet as a perfume: Spenglerianism in European and American modernism’], in Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte [Journal of World History], 1:15 (April 2014), 141-163.
‘Political theory from the first-person perspective. From «key experience » to open society’, [in Russian:‘Politicheskaia teoria ot pervogo litsa. Ot « kluchevogo perezhivania» k otkryvaniu obshestva’] special issue on ‘Closed Societies’, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie [The New Literary Review], 100 (Moscow, 2009), 55-75.
‘’, in Journal of European Studies, 36:1(March 2006), 5-30.

Book chapters

‘Roman law after 1917: Exile, Statelessness and the Search for Byzantium in the Work of Mikhail von Taube’, in , Eds. Kaius Tuori and Heta Bjorklund (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
‘Brest-Litovsk as a site of historical disorientation’, in , ed. Gusejnova (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 213-247.
‘Sympathy and synaesthesia in Tolstoy’s writings on the Crimean War’, In , Ed. Gavin Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3-24.
‘La mobilité intellectuelle comme problème herméneutique : vers un modèle de la pensée politique en groupes’, in , Eds. Arnault Skornicki and Chloé Gaboriaux (Paris: Presses de Septentrion, 2017)
‘Embedded cosmopolitanism: world literature in the age of the World Wars’, in , Eds. Terri Tomsky and Eddy Kent (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2017) (Chapter), book 432 pp., ISBN 9780773550971

Other publications

‘’, Forum: “Decolonising Colour”, Third Text (2019)
Contribution to BBC World Histories, June/July issue (2018)
‘, Conference review of Aby Warburg’s 150^th birthday conference, University of London, July 2017 (2016)
, Introduction to Photo Book by Maria Gruzdeva, Border. A Journey Along the Edges of Russia (Amsterdam: Schilt, 2016), ISBN-13: 978-9053308783
with Olga Smith, ‘Fotografie des letzten sowjetischen Jahrzehnts. Boris Michajlov als Auto-Phänomenologe der Stagnationszeit’ [‘Photography in the last Soviet decade: Boris Michajlov as an auto-phenomenologist of stagnation’, in Fotogeschichte, 136:35 (October 2015), 43-53.
(original in Russian), gefter.ru (Dec 2015)

	(2016)
	(2018)

Dr Gusejnova has contributed to a range of national and international media, from the BBC to independent productions on radio and TV. She has also been involved in collaborations with organisations and institutions such as TedX, , , Journal of the History of Ideas blog, and Third Text.

Dr Gusejnova has a special interest in making independently researched features in audio and video formats, which require a slow work process but enable imaginative collaborations across sectors. An example of this kind of work is her radio feature , which combines material culture with intellectual history to trace the experience of statelessness and homelessness.

Dr Gusejnova completed a video documentary on the fortunes of German intellectual history, supported by the ZEIT-Stiftung. Co-created with (King’s College, Cambridge), “Rosenöl und Deutscher Geist: The Fortunes of German Intellectual History” presents the fortunes of a distinctly German phenomenon. The documentary explores how the history of ideas declined in Germany after a period of innovation and prosperity that lasted through the long nineteenth century.

In 2022, she was awarded a grant, a project which aims to investigate how scholars who have been forced into exile by authoritarian regimes within/outside Europe are currently being integrated in the EU. It will be co-lead with (CEU) and (SNSPA).

• , a post on theUniversity of Sheffield's 'History Matters' blog (2022)

• A (2018)

• Dr Gusejnova appears as an expert in several episodes of , Dir. Michael Cove (2017, WildBear entertainment production, available on Amazon Prime).

• , a three-part multimedia blog series for the Journal of the History of Ideas (2017).

• , a conversation with Alexandra Sheveleva for Esquire Russian (2016, in Russian)

• , TedX talk at Goodenough College, London (2015)

• contribution to the Passionate Politics blog (2015)

‘• , talk for Postnauka.ru (2015, in Russian)

• talk for Postnauka.ru (2015, in Russian)

• , written for Postnauka.ru (2014, in Russian)

• an essay critique of a law passed in Russia on 11 June 2013, which bans the so-called “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships”, written for Postnauka.ru (2013, in Russian)

• , talk for Postnauka.ru (2013, in Russian)

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