Thinking through Visual Cultures of Baltic Science

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The histories of science in the Baltics abound with issues related to transnational and imperial history, colonialism, race, politics of knowledge and governance, etc. Many of these aspects yet wait to be discovered and discussed, as traditionally the history of science in the Baltics has often avoided critical perspectives, especially concerning the great men of local sciences. Today, the many recent calls to rethink the histories of colonialism in Eastern Europe and other parts of the erstwhile Russian Empire and the Soviet Union provide a new context and urgency for finding new perspectives on the histories of knowledge production in this region too. How did the imperial and colonial interests of the Empire shape the scientific institutions and knowledge in and about the Baltics? In what ways did the objectives and necessities of (Russian) nationalism and the Empire intersect or conflict in the production of scientific knowledge? In which ways did the Baltic scientists participate in the Russian and Soviet projects across the Eurasian continent and beyond? Whether and how to decolonize the local histories of science, but also the related collections and institutions?

The current panel explores these issues by focusing primarily on the relations between visual culture and science in the Baltics during the long imperial nineteenth century. Often underlooked in the traditional logocentric histories focusing on the great deeds, men and books of science, scientific illustrations, and other forms of visual knowledge production open up new, unexplored perspectives to the development of scientific knowledge in the Baltics, shedding light on marginalized subjects ranging from non-acknowledged, indigenous and female researchers to the agency of non-human species.

Short Bio

Catherine Gibson is a lecturer in East European and Eurasian Studies at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science, University of Tartu. She received her PhD in 2019 from the European University Institute in Florence. Her research focuses on the history of the Russian Empire, science, cartography, and nationalism, as well as contemporary memory and language politics. Her books include Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (2022) and The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders (2016), co-edited with Tomasz Kamusell and Motoki Nomachi. She is also technical editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies and series editor of “Politics and Society in the Baltic Sea Region,” published by Tartu University Press.

Jelizaveta Hristokina is a doctoral student in the field of history at the Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University. In her undergraduate thesis, she examined the “russification policy” of Governor Sergei Shakhovskoi in the framework of Slavophilism during the reign of Alexander III. Her master’s thesis explored the ethnographic stereotypes of Estonians created by Baltic Germans in the late 18th century within the discourse of scientific Russian nationalism in the late 19th century. For her doctoral dissertation, she focuses on the image of Estonian peasants within the Russian Empire in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, relying on ethnographic sources. The objective of her research lies in analyzing the interplay between scientific, national, and imperial perceptions.

Linda Kaljundi is a historian, Professor of Cultural history at Estonian Academy of Arts and Senior Research Fellow in environmental history at Tallinn University. She holds a PhD from the University of Helsinki. Kaljundi has published on Baltic and Nordic premodern and modern history and historiography, collective memory and nation building, as well as the entangled histories of environment, colonialism and science. She has also co-curated a number of interdisciplinary exhibitions, including The Conqueror’s Eye (2019) and Art or Science (2022).

Sub Unit

• History, Memory, and Identity

Chair

• Viktoras Bachmetjevas, Vytautas Magnus University

Individual Presentations

• Assembling a Multilayered Empire: Thematic Mapping in the Baltic Provinces - Catherine Helen Gibson, University of Tartu

• Ethnographic image(s) of the Estonian peasantry in the intersection of nationalist and imperial interests during the late Russian Empire: in text and image - Jelizaveta Hristokina, Tallinn University; The School of Humanities

• Visual knowledge production from the nineteenth-century Baltics and Russian colonial history - some examples on the potential of decolonisation - Linda Kaljundi, Estonian Academy of Arts / Tallinn University