On April 2, at 7 pm Tbilisi time, the biweekly research colloquium of the Institute for Social and Cultural Research, Ilia State University, will host Kai Willms with a talk on his research: “Peripheral Modernities: Imperial Urbanism in Three Different Borderlands of the Late Russian Empire”.
Abstract:
This paper presents a work-in-progress comparative study of urban development in three different peripheral regions of the late Russian Empire, focusing on the cities of Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Tashkent. Building on recent shifts in historiography from the imperial capitals to multiethnic peripheries, and from cultural to spatial and infrastructural history, the study aims to transcend single-case analyses by examining comparatively how the empire represented itself in predominantly non-Russian cities and how urban development simultaneously posed a challenge to imperial rule. The project examines both state-driven policies and local agency across three dimensions: sociospatial development; biopolitics, particularly medical policies; and the urban public sphere.
With a focus on preliminary findings regarding the history of urban healthcare, the paper highlights significant differences in how discourses and practices of ‘modernisation’ affected the relationship between the imperial administration and the local population. These differences reflect varying levels of coloniality in the European and Asian peripheries of the empire.
Bio:
Kai Willms is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chair for Eastern European History at the University of Basel. He holds a BA from the University of Freiburg, an MA from the Humboldt University of Berlin, and a PhD from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and has been an exchange student at the University of Warsaw as well as a Visiting PhD Scholar at the Department of History at Columbia University. His doctoral thesis on the role of Polish émigré scholars in the development of Eastern European Studies in Cold War America has won several awards, including the Scientific Award of the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Germany in 2024. In the autumn of 2026, he will be a Visiting Fellow at the Georgia Branch Office of the Max Weber Foundation in Tbilisi.
The event will take place in English via Zoom. Registration is required.
To register please follow this link.
