Aleksandr Rusanov

History and Memory in Contemporary Russia

Aleksandr Rusanov is a PhD in History, postdoctoral researcher at Bielefeld University, Germany, and lecturer at the Free University (Brīvā Universitāte, Latvia). His dissertation, defended at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2016, focuses on the social history of the medieval Portuguese university. From 2016 to 2022, he was a senior researcher at the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI) and Lecturer in the School of History, both at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He took part in collective research projects on academic temporality, emotions in university communities, and images of the Middle Ages in popular culture. From 2020 to 2023 he co-authored and taught the Public History major course at the Higher School of Economics (Medievalism), on the basis of which in 2023 he developed a major of the same name at the Free University. Now his research interests include public history, medievalism studies, critical heritage studies. He is currently working on a project “Politicized and Depoliticized Global Medievalism in Russia, 2010–20s” (grant by Gerda Henkel Foundation).