About me

Dina Gusejnova (PhD in History, University of Cambridge) is Associate Professor in International History at LSE. Her research interests include modern European political, intellectual and cultural history of transitional periods, especially the revolutions of 1918-20 and the two World Wars. She is currently working on a cultural and intellectual history of forced displacement and internment in the Second World War.

Dina Gusejnova’s first major research project dealt with ideas of European integration after the First World War. In European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2016, pbk 2018), she reconstructs the intellectual lifeworld of three fading empires, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, through the eyes of a group of German-speaking authors whose social lives traversed the three societies. The book maps out how ideas of Europe emerged in response to the decline of the continental empires.

In her subsequent research, Dina has concentrated on connections between cosmopolitan thought and war. In this context, she has recently edited Cosmopolitanism in Conflict: Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), which was the outcome of an international collaboration involving authors from the UK, the United States, Turkey and Russia. Revisiting the cultural history of global conflicts from the Seven Years’ War to the Cold War, they show how cosmopolitan ideas have been implicated not only in practices and legal justifications of war but also in personal experiences of conflict.

Further research has centred on German intellectual history in global contexts, as well as the history of critical and social theory. Her articles in this field, including work on authors such as Ernst Cassirer, Oswald Spengler, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Weber, appeared in the Journal of European Studies, Cultural History, Comparativ, the Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte (Journal of World History), Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, and European Journal of Social Theory, and with Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury Academic and the Presses Universitaires Septentrion.

More recently, Dina Gusejnova has been thinking about history in a more diverse range of media, focusing on forms ranging from dialogue and conversation to video essays. She is the co-host of the podcast International History Now, which explores topical issues from a historical perspective with one or two invited guests. She has also contributed a feature to BBC Radio 4, and made independent documentary films in an essay format. One film explores about European identity and colonial legacies, Khadija’s Crown (2022), another film, called Rosenöl und Deutscher Geist (2020), looks at the impact of 1933 on the discipline of intellectual history, and most recently she has completed a documentary essay about the impossibility of telling the history of the 20th century in the Russian state historical museum, called The Last Room (2021).

Biography

Dr Gusejnova holds a BA, MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she taught the history of political thought. She was also awarded a European Doctorate from the Marie Curie consortium supported by the European Commission. After receiving a Harper-Schmidt postdoctoral fellowship from the Society of Fellows, she taught social and political theory in Chicago as Collegiate Assistant Professor. Dr Gusejnova has also held postdoctoral awards from the AHRC, the DAAD and the Leverhulme Trust. Having taught at UCL and

Queen Mary University of London, in 2015 she took up a lectureship at the University of Sheffield. Dr Gusejnova joined the LSE in September 2019.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Higher Education Academy, as well as an Honorary Research Associate of the Centre for Transnational History at UCL and the History Department at the University of Sheffield. She serves as Historical advisor to the ‘Imagining History’ programme for young writers led by the Young Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Dina is one of the co-conveners of the IHR Seminar in the History of Political Ideas, and a co-PI on two CIVICA research projects, Protecting Academics at Risk: A Survey of European and EU Practice (PROAC), and Democracy and Its Discontents. A Historical Examination of the Current Predicament of Democracy (DEMOS). She is one of the co-founders of the University of New Europe, a collective of academics who seek to facilitate new ways of researching and teaching European history and politics from a global perspective involving academics at risk from war and political persecution.

VIDEO: Watch Dr Dina Guesjnova talk about her historical research on Temporary States.

How did the idea of the state change over the course of the 20th century? And what did people do with these changing ideas?

Expertise Details

Modern European History; Intellectual and Cultural History; History and Social Theory

Dr Dina Gusejnova teaches the following courses in the Department:

At undergraduate level:

HY332 - Interwar Worlds: The Cultural Consequences of the First World War (Suspended)

At postgraduate level:

HY4B3: Citizenship in 20th century political thought: intellectual history in case studies

She also supervises the following students:

Research student	Provisional thesis title
Ryoya Mizuno	The International Thought of Arnold J. Toynbee: The Decline of the West and the End of the British Imperial System
Edoardo Vaccari	Socialism and the Making of Europe: ‘Third Force’ Socialists in the European project (1932-1951)

Books

European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2016, pbk 2018, Open Access)
Cosmopolitanism in Conflict: Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Articles

'Librarians as Agents of German Foreign Policy and the Cultural Consequences of the First World War', The Historical Journal, (2023), 1-23.
'Gegen Deutsches K.Z. Paradies. Thinking about Englishness on the Isle of Man during the Second World War', History of European Ideas, 46:5 (2020), 697-714
'"Dynasty" in modern German intellectual history: many concepts, or none?', Global Intellectual History (2020), online access.
‘Europe To-Morrow: the shifting frontiers of European civilization in the political thought of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’, Turkish Journal of Sociology, 38:2 (2018), 227-253.
‘Changes of status in states of political uncertainty: towards a theory of derecognition’, European Journal of Social Theory (July 2018).
‘Jazz anxiety and the European fear of cultural change: Towards a transnational history of a political emotion’, in Cultural History, 5:1 (April 2016), 26-50.
‘Keyserling’s keywords: the challenges of translating Europe’, in Comparativ, 2 (October 2015), 29-45, reviewed here.
‘Der Prophet als Parfum: Das Spenglersche am europäischen und amerikanischen Modernismus’ [‘The Prophet as a perfume: Spenglerianism in European and American modernism’], in Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte [Journal of World History], 1:15 (April 2014), 141-163.
‘Political theory from the first-person perspective. From «key experience » to open society’, [in Russian:‘Politicheskaia teoria ot pervogo litsa. Ot « kluchevogo perezhivania» k otkryvaniu obshestva’] special issue on ‘Closed Societies’, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie [The New Literary Review], 100 (Moscow, 2009), 55-75.
‘Concepts of culture and technology in Germany, 1916 – 1933: Ernst Cassirer and Oswald Spengler’, in Journal of European Studies, 36:1(March 2006), 5-30.

Book chapters

‘Roman law after 1917: Exile, Statelessness and the Search for Byzantium in the Work of Mikhail von Taube’, in Roman Law and the Idea of Europe, Eds. Kaius Tuori and Heta Bjorklund (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
‘Brest-Litovsk as a site of historical disorientation’, in Cosmopolitanism and Global Conflict: Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years’ War to the Cold War, ed. Gusejnova (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 213-247.
‘Sympathy and synaesthesia in Tolstoy’s writings on the Crimean War’, In Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense, Ed. Gavin Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3-24.
‘La mobilité intellectuelle comme problème herméneutique : vers un modèle de la pensée politique en groupes’, in Vers une histoire sociale des idées politiques, Eds. Arnault Skornicki and Chloé Gaboriaux (Paris: Presses de Septentrion, 2017)
‘Embedded cosmopolitanism: world literature in the age of the World Wars’, in Negative Cosmopolitanism: Rethinking world citizenship after globalization, Eds. Terri Tomsky and Eddy Kent (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2017) (Chapter), book 432 pp., ISBN 9780773550971

Other publications

‘Malevich’s Black Square under X-ray: A dialogue on race, revolution and art history’, Forum: “Decolonising Colour”, Third Text (2019)
‘Has Russia always played by its own rules?’ Contribution to BBC World Histories, June/July issue (2018)
‘Fortune. Failure. Fetish. Fest. Aby Warburg’s glorious Nachleben’, Conference review of Aby Warburg’s 150^th birthday conference, University of London, July 2017 (2016)
‘Tracing Russia's Frontier’, Introduction to Photo Book by Maria Gruzdeva, Border. A Journey Along the Edges of Russia (Amsterdam: Schilt, 2016), ISBN-13: 978-9053308783
with Olga Smith, ‘Fotografie des letzten sowjetischen Jahrzehnts. Boris Michajlov als Auto-Phänomenologe der Stagnationszeit’ [‘Photography in the last Soviet decade: Boris Michajlov as an auto-phenomenologist of stagnation’, in Fotogeschichte, 136:35 (October 2015), 43-53.
‘War and empire through the prism of transnational history’ (original in Russian), gefter.ru (Dec 2015)

	European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957 (2016)
	Cosmopolitanism in Conflict: Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War (2018)

Dr Gusejnova has contributed to a range of national and international media, from the BBC to independent productions on radio and TV. She has also been involved in collaborations with organisations and institutions such as TedX, Tate Modern, Postnauka/SeriousScience, Journal of the History of Ideas blog, and Third Text.

Dr Gusejnova has a special interest in making independently researched features in audio and video formats, which require a slow work process but enable imaginative collaborations across sectors. An example of this kind of work is her radio feature ‘The Tarpaulin’ for BBC Radio 4, which combines material culture with intellectual history to trace the experience of statelessness and homelessness.

Dr Gusejnova completed a video documentary on the fortunes of German intellectual history, supported by the ZEIT-Stiftung. Co-created with Professor Richard Bourke (King’s College, Cambridge), “Rosenöl und Deutscher Geist: The Fortunes of German Intellectual History” presents the fortunes of a distinctly German phenomenon. The documentary explores how the history of ideas declined in Germany after a period of innovation and prosperity that lasted through the long nineteenth century.

In 2022, she was awarded a CIVICA EU grant, a project which aims to investigate how scholars who have been forced into exile by authoritarian regimes within/outside Europe are currently being integrated in the EU. It will be co-lead with Andrea Petö (CEU) and Alina Dragolea (SNSPA).

• 'To Be Open, In Spite Of The Past”: Revisiting Putin’s Words In The Light Of Russia’s War In Ukraine', a post on theUniversity of Sheffield's 'History Matters' blog (2022)

• A conversation on her book and doing transnational history after the Cold War with Julia Klimova from the Toynbee Prize Blog (2018)

• Dr Gusejnova appears as an expert in several episodes of The Impossible Peace: The Time Between World Wars, Dir. Michael Cove (2017, WildBear entertainment production, available on Amazon Prime).

• ‘The state, and revolution: A site-specific view of centenaries’, a three-part multimedia blog series for the Journal of the History of Ideas (2017).

• ‘Why has humanity become so emotional?’, a conversation with Alexandra Sheveleva for Esquire Russian (2016, in Russian)

• ‘Missing Citizenship: the history of statelessness’, TedX talk at Goodenough College, London (2015)

• ‘People on the Wall: Political Happiness Remembered’, contribution to the Passionate Politics blog (2015)

‘• The iconography of political murders’, talk for Postnauka.ru (2015, in Russian)

• ‘Spengler’s Decline of the West’, talk for Postnauka.ru (2015, in Russian)

• ‘The memory turn in history’, written for Postnauka.ru (2014, in Russian)

• ‘On the History of Sexual Orientation as Orientation in Thinking’, an essay critique of a law passed in Russia on 11 June 2013, which bans the so-called “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships”, written for Postnauka.ru (2013, in Russian)

• ‘On legality and legitimacy’, talk for Postnauka.ru (2013, in Russian)

Dr Dina Gusejnova

Associate Professor

Department of International History

About me

Expertise Details

Teaching and supervision

Publications

Books

News and media