Education, Ideology, and the Making of Knowledge in the Russian Empire

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel examines the formation and institutionalization of academic disciplines in the Russian Empire, focusing on the relationship between education and ideology. It explores how state policies, professional networks, and broader intellectual debates shaped emerging fields such as pedagogy, history, and language instruction. The panel considers the processes through which knowledge was codified, adapted, and disseminated within educational institutions and public discourse. Key questions include how educational disciplines responded to the political and social needs of the imperial state, the extent to which they served as instruments of ideological consolidation, and the role of educators in shaping or resisting state narratives. The discussion also addresses knowledge transfer and adaptation, tracing how foreign pedagogical and historiographical ideas were reinterpreted within Russian institutional frameworks.
By analyzing the intersection of disciplinary formation, state intervention, and public engagement, this panel provides a framework for understanding how education functioned as a site of ideological negotiation in Imperial Russia.

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Victoria S. Frede, UC Berkeley

Papers

• Education of the Heart: Cultural Transfers, Forms of Subjectivity, and the Rise of Pedagogy in Late 18th-Century Russia - Oleg Larionov, U of Oxford (UK)

• History as Ideology: Imperial Historiography in the 1830s–1840s - Marianna Petiaskina, Harvard U

• Language and Education in Late Tsarist Russia: Between Reform and Control - Yoko Aoshima, Hokkaido U (Japan)

Discussant

• Darius Staliunas, Lithuanian Inst of History (Lithuania)