Dmitriy Dobrowolski’s Presentation at Oxford

From April 24 – 26th, 2015, an international academic conference ‘Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood before Modernity: Old Debates and New Perspectives’ took place at the University of Oxford. The event was organized by the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

Dmitriy Dobrowolski, Associate Professor at the HSE School of History, spoke at the conference on ‘In Search of Old Russian Ethnicity: The Table of Nations in Russian Chronicles of the Eleventh – Thirteenth Centuries’.

The topic of the paper was when and in what form the Old Russian chroniclers in 11th –13th centuries referred to genealogy of nations, which had been built by medieval intellectuals on the basis of Genesis, as well as to the closely related legends about the world being divided among the sons of Noah. Comparison of the unearthed references to these stories demonstrated clear differences between the late 13th-century chronicles and earlier writings, all of which is important in understanding the development of the historical self-consciousness of Old Rus.

The full programme of the conference can be viewed on the Centre’s website.