Dr. Annelie Bachmaier
Junior Fellow, October 2026 to September 2027
TU Dresden
- B.A. in Russian Studies, Polish Studies, Comparative Cultural Studies in Regensburg; M.A. (Honors) in Eastern European Studies in Regensburg and Munich (2007–2012)
- PhD at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies (DFG, Excellence Initiative), Regensburg and Munich; dissertation in Slavic Studies (2012–2019)
- Post doc at the Institute of Slavic Studies at TU Dresden, habilitation project in Slavic/Yiddish Studies (2019–2026)
Fellow-Projekt: Slavic Studies in Relation to Political Caesuras (1925–2025)
Tandem project together with PD Dr. Tatjana Hofmann
Since the outbreak of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Slavic Studies and its expertise have moved into the spotlight, yet at the same time the discipline finds itself in a state of crisis, in which long-standing principles and perspectives are being questioned and revised. We assume that the reasons for this are rooted in the traditional dominance of Russian Studies, combined with an insufficient reflection of both Russia’s hegemonic role on the one hand, and an often-unconscious perpetuation of colonial patterns of thought towards Central and Eastern Europe in the West on the other hand.
Using this current discussion as a starting point, our project aims to write a critical history of Slavic Studies in Western Europe that examines the development of the discipline’s research and teaching practices in relation to the main political caesuras of the last 100 years, especially World War II, the Cold War, the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Russian war against Ukraine. In order to understand entanglements between Slavic Studies and (inter)national politics, our analysis will focus on the question of how both colonial thought and postcolonial theory are reflected in the work of scholars and institutions. The study’s overall goal is the initiation of a self-reflexive turn in Slavic Studies that helps strengthen and diversify the discipline and thus reinforce its relevance in academic and non-academic contexts.
We will use an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach to the history of knowledge that takes into account different factors of epistemic practices in academic “working worlds”: under the umbrella of discourse analysis, qualitative interviews with scholars of Slavic Studies will be triangulated with text analysis and archival research at selected Institutes of Slavic Studies, which will serve as our case studies. The overall project, consisting of about 20 case studies, is designed for a duration of four years. During our one-year Alfried Krupp Fellowship, we will conduct a clearly defined sub-project based on four case studies, which will lay the basis for the larger project.