How did a world shaped by western colonial empires look to mid-nineteenth century Russian observers? In answering this question, the talk focuses on the impressions of Singapore recorded in a famous travel account of a Russian naval voyage around the coastal rims of Africa and Asia, part of an official Russian mission to open Japan to European trade. Singapore is the place where questions of colonialism and global trade come into focus for the Russian travelers. In the extensive network of Euro-American imperialism’s global connections across Asia’s city ports, the Russians see the emergence of a new world order, one in which they must compete and cooperate with their western rivals.

About the speaker

Professor Edyta M. Bojanoska

Professor and Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Chair, European Studies Council, MacMillan Centre, Yale University

Edyta M. Bojanowska is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University and Chair of the European Studies Council at Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She is the author of two prize-winning monographs about empire and nationalism in nineteenth-century Russian literature and intellectual history. Her first book, Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism (2007) challenges the Russocentric myths around this Ukrainian-born Russophone writer. A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada (2018), on which this talk is based, uses Ivan Goncharov’s travelogue as a lens onto global imperial history and Russian colonial imagination. An effort to integrate Russia into accounts of European imperialism connects this book with Professor Bojanowska’s current project, Empire and the Russian Classics, which is a postcolonial rereading of the Russian nineteenth-century literary canon. Her scholarship has been supported by the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Slavic Research Center at the University of Hokkaido, and the Harvard Society of Fellows.

About the moderator

Associate Professor Maria Taroutina

Associate Professor of Art History, Russian and Slavic Studies, and Head of Studies, Arts and Humanities, Yale-NUS College

As a scholar of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Associate Professor Maria Taroutina has focused her research primarily on the architecture, painting, and sculpture of Imperial and early Soviet Russia with the aim of tracing its historical contribution to international modernism. She received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University in 2013, where she was also an undergraduate student (Class of 2006).