• Culture, Politics & Place

Research Interests

Mark’s work ranges across the boundaries of political, cultural and historical geography, supported by strong regional expertise in Russia and Central Europe (Poland and Germany).  His interests are focused on three broad thematic areas:

• geographies of nationhood and national identity
• geopolitics and the role of space and territory in contemporary political ideologies.
• the politics and political aesthetics of nature representation and landscape art

Biography

Mark Bassin gained his PhD at the University of California-Berkeley in 1983.  He has taught at UCLA, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and UCL, and held visiting positions at the Universities of Chicago, Copenhagen, and Pau (France).  He has received numerous personal fellowships, from the Fulbright Foundation, the Kennan Institute, Remarque Institute NYU, American Academy (Berlin), Slavic Research Center (Sapporo), and Institute for European History (Mainz).  His research has also been supported by grants from the AHRC, British Academy, DAAD, NCEEER, NEH, and the Ford Foundation.  From 1996-2004 he served as Secretary for the Commission for the History of Geographic Thought of the International Geographical Union.  He has been a consultant for the World Economic Forum, and was a founding member of the Valdai Forum in Moscow, in which capacity he met on several occasions with former President Vladimir Putin and members of his government.  Mark sits on numerous advisory boards for international journals, and since 1999 has been Associate Editor for the journal Geopolitics.  From 2006-2009 Mark was on study leave, supported by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.

Mark is also Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Current / Recent Research

“The Gumilev Mystique: Eurasianism, Ethno-Nationalism, and the Geopolitics of Identity in Modern Russia” (under contract with Cornell University Press)

“The Greening of Utopia: Nature and the Political Aesthetics of Landscape in Stalinist Socialist Realism”

“Neo-Conservativism, the ‘New Right’ and the Renaissance of Geopolitics in Russia, Germany, and the United States”

Other Research Activities

In September 2009 Mark is convening an international conference at GEES on Spaces of Nationhood: Landscape and Identity after Communism.  The conference is funded with a grant from the CEELBAS network, and will include participants from the UK, USA, Russia, Poland, and Germany.

Key Publications since 2001

In Press:

Politics and Place in Modern Russian History:  Collection co-edited with Chris Ely and Melissa Stockdale; Under contract with Northern Illinois University Press.

 “Nurture is Nature: Lev Gumilev and the Ecology of Ethnicity”  Slavic Review (Winter)

“’Родина’ как экологическая ниша: размышления Льва Гумилева об этносе и ландшафте,  Гуманитарная География (Moscow)

“Space, Ethnicity, and Eurasian Visions of Russian Nationhood,” chapter in Mastering Space: Raum und Raumbewältigung als Probleme der russischen Geschichte.  Karl Schlölegel, ed;  Munich: Schriften des historischen Kollegs

2009

“The Emergence of Ethnogeopolitics in post-Soviet Russia” Eurasian Geography and Economics 50 (2): 131-149.

2008

“Eurasianism ‘Classical’ and ‘Neo’: Lines of Continuity” Chapter in Beyond the Empire: Images of Russia in the Eurasian Cultural Context, Tetsuo Mochizuki, ed; Sapporo: Slavic Research Center;  279-294.

“The Morning of our Motherland: Fedor Shurpin’s Portrait of Stalin (1949)” chapter in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, Valerie Kievelson and Joan Newberger, eds, New Haven: Yale University Press; 214-217.

2007

“Civilizations and their Discontents: Geography and Geopolitics in the Huntington Thesis,” Geopolitics 12: 351–374.

“Общность по Трубецкому или этнос по Гумилёву? Два взгляда на Евразию”  Вестник Евразии 4: 156-81.

“Lev Gumilev and Russian National Identity during and after the Soviet Era,” chapter in Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture, and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations (essays in honour of Anthony Smith); Athena Leoussi and Stephen Grosby, eds; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 143-160.

2006

“Geographies of Imperial Identity,” chapter in The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. II, Dominic Lieven, ed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 45-66.

“Mackinder’s Heartland and the Politics of Space in post-Soviet Russia” (with   K.E. Aksenov), Geopolitics 11: 1

2005

“Blood or Soil? The volkisch movement, the Nazis, and the legacy of Geopolitik,” chapter in How Green were the Nazis?  Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Marc Cioc, and Thomas Zeller, eds, Athens OH: Ohio University Press: 204-242

“The Political Spaces of Modernity,” Conoscere il mondo: Vespucci e la modernitè (Memoire Geografiche, Nuova Serie, 5): 163-176.

«Россия между Азии и Европы: идеологическое конструирование географического пространства» chapter in Российская империя в современной зарубежной литературы  [The Russian Empire in Contemporary Foreign Literature] Paul Werth, Aleksei Miller, and Pavel Kabytov, eds.  Moscow: Зарубежная Литература, pp. 277-310.

Research Students since 2001

Paul Richardson (PhD), “At the Edge of the Nation: The Kurile Islands and the search for national identity in post-Soviet Russia”  (ESRC “+3” fellowship; 2006-9)

Ozgur Tufekci (PhD),  “The Discourses of Eurasianism in Turkey" (Republic of Turkey, Ministry of National Education Fellowship, 2008-2011)

Date Profile Last Updated: 11/08/2009