Alexandra Kolesnik

History and Memory in Contemporary Russia

Alexandra Kolesnik is a PhD in History, associate fellow at the Bielefeld University, Germany, and lecturer at Free University (Brīvā Universitāte, Latvia). She holds the diploma in History from the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia (RSUH) (2010), MA degree in History from the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia (HSE) (2013), and PhD in History from the Ural State University, Ekaterinburg, Russia (2017). In 2011–2022, she worked as Senior research fellow at the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI) and Lecturer in the School of History, HSE, was involved in research projects and taught courses on public history and heritage studies in Russia. In 2023, she was a visiting scholar at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (ZZF), Germany, and Université Paris-Sorbonne, France (programme Atlas, Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH)). Since 2019, she is a member of the International Advisory Board of the journal “International Public History.” Her major fields of research are public history, heritage studies, popular music history, and sociology of culture. Her ongoing research focused on heritage activism in Russia and Soviet rock music heritage in the post-Soviet space.