Department of History

"My dissertation, 'How A Place Moves: Bratsk, 1917-1991' wonders whether an entity defined by its very immobility - a place - might in fact be in motion after all. Using archival sources, scientific/technical reports, newspaper articles, and locally published novels, essays, and poetry, I investigate the history of a place which 'moved' to higher ground in Eastern Siberia as a result of hydroelectric development in the 1950s and 60s. Playing with varieties of literal and figurative movement, the project is both historical and philosophical at its core: I read the history of Bratsk, and the Soviet Union more broadly, through classical paradoxes of identity, change, and motion, as well as 19th and 20th-century discussions of dialectics, historical materialism, phenomenology, poetry, mathematics, and science."