PRESENTATION
I am a PhD candidate specializing in British, Imperial Russian, and Near Eastern political, cultural, and social histories. More specifically, I work on non-fictional travel writing published during the long nineteenth century (1783–1914), written by British travelers about the southern frontier/borderland regions of the Russian Empire, namely the Crimea and the Caucasus. I aim to determine how British men and women traveled with imperial preconceptions in lands that were not under British imperial control. One may hypothesize that in their written and visual representations of “exotic” Others and “strange” landscapes, these travelers had to adopt a new, non-colonial yet perhaps dominating gaze while also striving to adapt these peoples and sceneries into familiar, British/European frames. The ethnographic and geopolitical dimensions of these travel books are also to be assessed; we can essentially speak of observations that reflect the national (British) identity just as much as the plurality of the Russian, Crimean, or Caucasian ones.
In regions where conflict, resistance, and annexation changed borders and administrative divisions, and where new infrastructures were built, town names changed, and new settlers brought in, there was a constant need to provide up-to-date information. Western readers’ interest in these Eastern regions was thus not only informed by pure literary pleasure, but also curiosity about the developing and transforming regions of the world, all the more so because these were colonial lands of a rival empire. At the same time, these representations of seemingly modernizing territories could paradoxically be hindered in favor of portraying the regions’ histories as unchanging and their peoples as living in tranquil, pastoral Arcadias, similar to the concept of the “noble savages.”
This PhD dissertation draws from studies (and critiques) of Orientalism, developed by Edward Said. It seeks to determine whether orientalist and imperialist policies existed or could exist in areas not under direct British colonial control. Initial findings show that they could and did exist. Yet in our context, Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the “anti-conquest” is perhaps more pertinent. Or, to borrow Andrew Hammond’s term, we could speak of “imagined colonialism.” C. A. Bayly’s emphasis on the need to study imperial history not only from the institutional point of view but also from that of the colonized societies (read also: travelees, to use a term from travel writing studies) greatly informs my project. On these grounds, the dissertation is enshrined in the field of world history, although it draws from area studies as well.
Finally, though focused on the long nineteenth century, this dissertation seeks to address questions modern readers might have about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On the one hand, the Crimean Peninsula and almost all the nation-states and dependent territories in the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan; Chechnya, Dagestan; Abkhazia, Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh…), have undergone a series of conflicts and major wars, starting in the early 1990s and stretching as late as 2024, with political realities still widely contested, particularly in the context of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has reopened discussions of Crimea’s status quo since 2014 and the Putin regime’s continued insistence on involvement in local affairs in the South Caucasus. The Russian war against Ukraine has also pushed the EU and largely European countries to reconsider the strategic importance of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions, in order to counterbalance Russia’s economic presence in Europe and to shake off European dependence on Russian energy resources. So much for the Russia-related spheres. On the other side of the coin, the formal British political estrangement (Brexit) from the Continent since 2016 has increased the attention of contemporary scholars and political, cultural, and economic historians to reassert the United Kingdom’s inseparability from Europe. Travels and travel writings from earlier centuries are one way to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the UK—and Russia—and the European Continent. Through an assessment of social and cultural factors, this dissertation project also integrates political history to explain both nineteenth-century events and their legacies on the post-Second World War, post-Cold War, and post-Soviet worlds. In this way, my project aims to reach a broad audience, interested in travels, cultural encounters, geography, ethnography, world history and literature, and Europe-Russia relations.
I work under the supervision of Hélène Ibata, Professor of British history at the University of Strasbourg and Director of UR 2325 Savoirs dans l’Espace Anglophone : Représentations, Culture, Histoire (SEARCH), and the co-supervision of Rodolphe Baudin, Professor of Russian literature at Sorbonne University in Paris and Co-Director of UMR 8224 Europe orientale, balkanique et médiane (EUR’ORBEM), in particular its Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches sur l’Europe orientale, l’Asie centrale et la Russie (CIRRUS).
My PhD thesis/dissertation is entitled, for the moment, Imperial Contacts in Contested Borderlands: The Physical and Imaginary Construction of the Crimea and the Caucasus as Russia’s Southern Frontier in British Travel Writing, 1783–1914 (or, in French, Contacts impériaux dans des confins contestés : la construction physique et imaginaire de la Crimée et du Caucase comme frontière méridionale de la Russie dans les récits de voyage britanniques, 1783–1914). More about the project on the national depository here: https://theses.fr/s368884.
Alongside my PhD, I also teach at the Department of Anglophone Studies of the University of Strasbourg. Of particular notice are my second-year (L2) workshop courses (TD) on British history, entitled “Empire, Economy, Emancipation: British Society Amid Reform and Modernization in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries” (first semester) and “Victorian Britain: Society, Politics, and Culture” (second semester).
My additional research interests include: 1) digital humanities, particularly mapping and discourse analysis; 2) twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture, music, televised media, and international politics, with a specific emphasis on the case of the Eurovision Song Contest; 3) EU relations with its eastern and southern neighbors; 4) the preservation and promotion of European and Near Eastern cultural expressions; and 5) translation and memory studies, particularly in relation to the Armenian post-memory generation.