Authors

Discussion

Peripheral Histories is a collaborative digital research project. Since 2016, we have been publishing cutting-edge scholarship on regional, liminal, and provincial spaces in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Eurasia and promoting dialogue between early career and more established scholars working on the region. While Moscow, St. Petersburg and other centres have a tendency to dominate scholarship in our field, our project has been shifting the focus and challenging the perception that ‘peripheries’ were ever ‘peripheral’. Peripheral Histories focuses on the multiple ways in which ‘peripherality’ has been constructed, the changing status of and relations between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, and the ways in which borderlands have been remade in changing circumstances. Drawing on their own experiences of conducting research in provincial Russian archives, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Baltic states, the panellists will reflect on the core questions of the project: How have certain regions come to be understood as peripheral and what are the consequences of this? Which conceptual frameworks and sources can be used to deepen our knowledge of ‘peripheral’ regions, and what are some of the challenges of working in under-explored archives? How can digital humanities tools enhance our understanding of ‘peripheral’ actors, events, and processes? This roundtable is organised by the BASEES Eurasian Regions Study Group.