Intelligentsia in the Russian Empire • Andrzej Nowak (Jagiellonian University, Kraków)

What impact did the imperial context have on the intellectual elites of Eastern Europe of the last 200 years? How did the social and intellectual phenomenon of intelligentsia influence the history of the Russian Empire from the end of the 18^th until the beginning of the 20^th century? Dr. Andrzej Nowak will address these old questions with a help of a new model of historical interaction between the imperial center’s counter-elite (the rebellious fraction of “central” intelligentsia) and counter-elites (intelligentsias) of non-Russian peripheries of the empire. This interaction runs parallel to the collaboration of the central and peripheral elites and the assimilation of the latter into the former. His discussion will focus specifically on relations between the Polish intelligentsia and the Russian imperial center throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

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Andrzej Nowak is a Polish historian, public intellectual, and professor of Eastern European history at Jagiellonian University and at the Institute of History (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw). He served as editor-in-chief of a political-cultural bimonthly ARCANA  from 1994 to 2012 and has published more than twenty books, mostly on Eastern European political and intellectual history. He was a visiting professor and lecturer at many universities in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Europe. Dr. Nowak is currently the chairman of the Advisory Council of The Center for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding and a member of the National Development Council, appointed by the Polish President Andrzej Duda.
 
The Carolina Seminar: Russia and Its Emipres, East and West is co-sponsored by the Carolina Seminar Program, the UNC Department of History, and the Duke Council for European Studies. Please note that the participants will give an overview of their projects, but will not read a formal paper. Instead, papers or book chapters will be posted here ahead of time for those who are interested in attending and participating in the discussion.