Claire Roosien
Assistant Professor
Education:
Ph.D. - Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations/ Russian History (Joint PhD) University of Chicago
Brief Biography:
I am a scholar of cultural politics in Central Asia, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union. At Providence, I teach courses in the Development of Western Civilization sequence, in Women's and Gender Studies, and on Russian and Eurasian history.
My current research project examines the role of local cultural producers (musicians, performers, writers, and activists) in imagining socialism in Central Asia. Drawing on sources in multiple languages of Central Asia and a variety of cultural media, I put forward the category of a “state public” to theorize the unpredictable dynamics of popular participation even in the context of authoritarian control over cultural production. My article on the Red Teahouse as an institution of the state public in Central Asia is forthcoming in Kritika. A future project will examine the role of late Soviet performance culture in shaping ethnic/ racial and gender dynamics in the Soviet Union and the Third World. Another project examines the afterlives of Orthodox Christian missionary schools for non-Russian minorities in prerevolutionary and early Soviet Russia.
