Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Stefan Huebner, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, was special in many ways. It not only divided the two largest Eurasian empires, it was also the place where European and Asian civilizations met, where nomads and sedentary people mingled, where the imperial interests of Russia and later the Soviet Union clashed with those of Qing and Republican China and Japan, and where the world’s two largest Communist regimes hailed their friendship and staged their enmity. In this talk, I will discuss my recent book, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border, which examines the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sören Urbansky is a historian of Russia and China in the modern era, specializing in imperial and racial entanglements, emigration and the history of borders. He joined the German Historical Institute in 2018, first as a research fellow in global and transnational history in Washington, DC, and since 2021 as the director of its Pacific Regional Office at the University of California, Berkeley. Sören has previously taught Chinese and Russian history at the Universities of Munich and Freiburg, and he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of thee monographs, including Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). Sören is currently working on a new project that examines anti-Chinese sentiments in a global perspective.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.