Professor Yuri Slezkine
Senior Research Fellow
Yuri Slezkine is a Senior Research Fellow. He is a scholar of Russian and world history, Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He was born and raised in Moscow, USSR, and worked as a Portuguese interpreter in Mozambique and English instructor in Portugal before moving to Austin, Texas to study Russian history. He has taught at Wake Forest University and, for 27 years, at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the International Institute at the University of Michigan, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Vassar College, Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham, and Visiting Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and Sciences Po and EHESS in Paris.
His current project is a comparative history of sacred texts and their authors, including the Confucian canon, the Sanskrit classics, the Christian, Islamic, and Buddhists scriptures, and the cults of national bards from Homer and Virgil to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pushkin, and Mickiewicz.
Yuri Slezkine’s books include Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994) and In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, coedited with Sheila Fitzpatrick (Princeton UP, 2000). His 2004 book, The Jewish Century, has received several awards and has been translated into ten languages. His most recent book, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton UP, 2017), was named among the best books of 2017 by the New York Times, Spectator, Guardian, Economist, London Review of Books, and Le Monde, among others, and has been translated into six languages, with several more in press.
Where next?
History
