Early Modernity Beyond the West: Valerie Kivelson: To What Question is Early Modernity the Answer? Considering Muscovy in the World

The next meeting of Early Modernity Beyond the West leads us to Muscovy. In an event co-sponsored with CMEMS and the History Department, Professor Valerie Kivelson will address the question: To What Question Is Early Modernity the Answer? Considering Muscovy in the World. 

RSVP for the Valerie Kivelson talk.

Professor Valerie Kivelson is Thomas N Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F Thurnau Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on early modern Russian history, history of cartography, empire, visuality, and witchcraft, with interests in politics, gender, and religion in the Russian Empire and in comparative perspective. Her publications include Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013); Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2006); Autocracy in the Provinces: Russian Political Culture and the Gentry in the Seventeenth Century (1997); Russia’s Empires (2016), coauthored with Ronald G. Suny; Witchcraft in Early Modern & Modern Russia and Ukraine: A Sourcebook (2020), translated and edited with Christine D. Worobec; Picturing Russian Empire (2023), an edited volume with Joan Neuberger and Sergei Kozlov; and Images and the Making of the Russian Empire, 1471-1721 (2025). 

Early Modernity Beyond the West aims to investigate whether and how the concept of early modernity can be extended to Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia between the 15th and the 18th centuries. The project brings together professors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from Stanford and from other institutions, who work in the early modern field in history, art history, literature, and religion. In this way, the group fosters reflection on the features and issues of early modernity.

Assessing the breadth and relevance of early modernity for Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia helps reconsider the concept on a global scale. In turn, defining early modernity as a transnational concept allows for more accurate analyses of each region’s specificities. Hence, the group’s guiding questions are: What are the defining traits of early modernity? What are the specificities of local experiences of early modernity? How do these specificities combine to delineate early modernity as a transnational concept?