Event Date
Book Talk - A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness
Marina Mogilner of (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Thursday, February 20, 2025
5:00 pm, 912 Sproul
Awarded a 2023 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History Honorable Mention for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia from ASEEES, Professor Mogilner’s book connects Jews and race in the context of anticolonial politics in the Russian Empire and explores Jews’ attempts to imagine the postimperial future in the region in nonterritorial terms. The result of decades of archival and library work, A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness uncovers the little-known reality of a comprehensive project of Jewish self-racializing. This reality included the science of Jewish race, racialized Jewish politics, and a broad biopolitical movement.
Marina Mogilner is Professor and Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair in Russian and East European Intellectual History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a founding coeditor of Ab Imperio quarterly, dedicated to new imperial history and studies of nationalism in the post-Soviet space. Her most recent books include: Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference: The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky against the Russian Empire (Indiana University Press, 2023); A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness (Harvard University Press, 2022); edited volume A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and Nation State (1760–1920), for the 6-volume Bloomsbury series “A Cultural History of Race” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021); and Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). Her current project explores the role of modern ethnography and the invention of the human sacrifice narrative in the late Russian Empire.
