Francesca Silano
Assistant Professor
Education:
Ph.D. - History University of Toronto
Area(s) of Expertise:
Francesca Silano is Assistant Professor of History and a scholar of late-Imperial and Soviet Russian History. She is a specialist of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in the early years of the Bolshevik regime and examines the legal, cultural and religious impacts of the upheaval of revolution and civil war on lay believers, hierarchs, and the institutions of the Church. She is a research scholar at the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought. Her book manuscript, The Battle for Russia’s Souls: Patriarch Tikhon, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Soviet State (1865-1925) is under contract with Cornell University Press.
PUBLICATIONS
“‘I am a Sincere Believer’: Rethinking Religiosity and Identity in the Early Soviet Union,” Slavic Review (forthcoming, Winter, 2023).
“‘A Dishonor to You and to the Church’: Patriarch Tikhon, Pogroms, and the Russian
Revolution, 1917-1919,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 23, no. 1 (Winter, 2022): 5-27.
“The Orthodox Church,” in Anna Berman, ed., Tolstoy in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 61-7.
“Christmas in Russia and Orthodox Europe,” in Timothy Larsen, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Christmas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 463-74.
“(Re)Constructing an Orthodox ‘Scenario of Power’: The Restoration of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate in Revolutionary Russia (1917-1918),” Revolutionary Russia 32, no. 1 (2019): 5-30.
“Canon Law in a Bolshevik Courtroom: The Russian Revolution as an Orthodox Legal Revolution,” (Russian Version), in State, Religion and Church in Russia and Worldwide 37, no. 1/2 (2019): 153-181.
