This event will be held virtually as a Zoom webinar and streamed via YouTube Live. There will be no in-person event.
To register and access live stream links, visit the event page on our website:
https://harriman.columbia.edu/event/virtual-event-russias-worlds-soviet-union-and-middle-east
Register here for the Zoom webinar, or tune in on YouTube Live.
Please join us for an event in the Russia's Worlds Lecture Series, a discussion with Sam Hirst (Bilkent University, Ankara) and Masha Kirasirova (NYU Abu Dhabi).
Sam Hirst teaches in Ankara at Bilkent University’s Department of International Relations. His research focuses on Russia, Turkey, and transnational history—in particular, Russia’s and Turkey’s shared legacies of imperial power and their opposition to Western imperialism. Before moving to Bilkent in 2017, he worked at the European University at St. Petersburg, where he served for two years as chair of the history department. He is currently finishing a manuscript on Soviet-Turkish exchange in the interwar period.
Masha Kirasirova is a historian of exchanges between the Soviet Eurasia and the Middle East. Her work approaches modern Middle Eastern history from a “Second World” perspective. It brings together several hitherto separate scholarly domains: Soviet nationalities policy with regard to the USSR’s Muslim populations; social and cultural history of Stalinism in shaping the experience of Arab communists in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s; cultural exchange with Arab leftist intellectuals during the Cold War; and the impacts of these exchanges on artistic, bureaucratic, and political practices inside the USSR and on those exported to Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt. Kirasirova’s research has been supported by the SSRC InterAsia, Eurasia, and IDRF programs, Mellon/ACLS, and IREX as well as a number of university-wide, competitive research fellowships at NYU. Her dissertation was awarded the Robert C. Tucker/Stephen F. Cohen Dissertation Prize (2015). Before coming to NYUAD she spent a semester as a visiting research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin.
