Alexander Semyonov
About
My professional path has consisted of several tracks. I was trained as a historian at Ivanovo State University specializing in source-critique studies and completed my graduate training and dissertation at Central European University, which exposed me to US and European schools of modern history and comparative history.
One track of my career path took me to explorations of empire, nationalism, colonialism, and historically constituted diversity, which culminated in joining efforts to establish a new scholarly journal, Ab Imperio (2000), and its subsequent projects. The work at the Ab Imperio collective has tremendously enriched my own research and led me onto the path of shaping a new international field of new imperial histories and reshaping the field of Russian-Soviet studies.
The second track was associated with institution building. I started with a junior role at Smolny Institute in 2003 (the joint liberal arts program between Bard College in the US and St. Petersburg University in the Russian Federation), being responsible for shaping the curriculum of the joint history, political science, and human rights program, Smolny’s study abroad program, and the Smolny Collegium of Advanced Studies.
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After 10 years at Smolny, I was offered the opportunity to establish a new Faculty of History at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg in 2012. As a founding dean of the History Faculty, I led the creation of undergraduate, MA, and doctoral programs in history as well as the Center for Historical Research. The undergraduate program in history reached the top three in the rankings of history programs in Russia and became the top second education partnership between USA and Russian educational institutions. The MA and doctoral programs developed joint international arrangements with major European universities. The joint doctoral program Global Histories of Empire, which I established with my colleagues at the University of Turin in Italy, was the first joint doctoral program in history in Russia.
The third track in my professional career was focused on teaching and developing a new generation of historians. I have served as a history curriculum expert for Civic Education Project, Academic Fellowship Program, Open Society Institute, the US Department of State’s Freedom Support Educational Partnerships Program, and the Muslim Education Project of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation. I also held several visiting professorships at Central European University (Budapest and Vienna), the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, the University of Jyväskylä, Bielefeld University, the University of Regensburg, Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, and the University of Naples Federico II. I also taught and directed post-graduate professional training schools in Russian imperial and global history, most recently in the program “Russia in the World of the Imperial Era (1650-1917)” at the London School of Economics. Currently, I teach Russian and European history as John J. McCloy ’22 Visiting Professor of History at Amherst College and continue to work as co-editor of Ab Imperio.
Email: asemyonov@amherst.edu