Events & Calendars "Commemorative Strategies and Museum Practices in Contemporary Russia": Talk by Ekaterina Boltunova

Through an analysis of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, a memorial complex opened in Yekaterinburg in 2015, Ekaterina Boltunova will discuss the formation of collective memory in relation to Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation, and its roots in commemorative strategies that emerged in Imperial Russia and persisted through the Soviet period.

Ekaterina Boltunova is associate professor at the Faculty of Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, and director of the graduate program Cultural and Intellectual History: Between East and West. Professor Boltunova was a 2008-2009 Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University; a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2009); and a participant in multiple international research projects. Her research interests include cultural and political history of the Russian empire and the USSR, topography and semiotics of power, imperial discourse of war, historical memory, and Soviet and post-Soviet reception of the imperial space. She is the author of "Peter the Great’s Guard as a Military Corporation" (Moscow, 2011, in Russian); "Reception of Imperial and Tsarist Spheres of Authority in Russia, 1990s-2010s" (Ab Imperio 2 (2016): 261-309); “Russian Officer Corps and Military Efficiency: 1800-1914” (Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 16, no. 2 (2015): 413-422); “Imperial Throne Halls and Discourse of Power in the Topography of Early Modern Russia (late 17th – 18th centuries)”; "In the Emperor's House: Palaces from Augustus to the Age of Absolutism" (Berlin : De Gruyter, 2015: 341-352), and many other works.