Team_Lopatina_Sofia_2024

Dr. des Sofia Lopatina

Researcher
+49 (0) 341 234264 49
ORCID Entanglements and Globalisation

About

Sofia Lopatina studied comparative history in Budapest, Hungary, and sociology in St. Petersburg, Russia. She received her PhD (Dr. des) in history from Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (2023)/Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Her doctoral dissertation focused on youth and social control in Leningrad in the 1960s, with the aim of rethinking binary concepts such as “state and society” or “resistance and conformity”, in the history of state socialism. In 2023, she was awarded a visiting scholarship at GWZO. 

Since 2024, she has been working as a researcher on the project titled Imperial Meaning-Making of Central Asian Social Spaces: A Study of Geographical Imaginations in Travel Writing for the Russian Empire (1839-1905), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)

Work Focus

  • Russian colonialism in Central Asia
  • Cultural history of 19th and 20th century Russia
  • Youth cultures in late socialism

Current topic of research

The project reconstructs the geographical imaginations of social spaces in travel writing about Central Asia for the Russian Empire and their transformation from 1839 to 1905. It takes into account a wide range of communication levels, such as the relationships between authors and publishers, the motivations for travel and the authors’ networks.

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