Nari Shelekpayev

Interests:

I study the urban, cultural, and political history of the late Russian empire, the Soviet Union, and its successor states. I am working on two book-length projects at the moment. The first one is a political and urban history of Kazakhstan and its capital cities in the 20th century. It is also a comparative history of non-European states (based on the cases of Brazil, Canada, and Kazakhstan), which relocated or transformed their capital cities in the transition “from colony to nation” from the late 19th century onwards. My second project focuses on the history of Kazakhstan and the way its cultural forms and political systems have evolved and co-constructed one another under the Soviet rule. My future research will focus on the urban and cultural history of the late Soviet Union and its successor states and will adopt comparative and transnational perspectives. I am particularly interested in the genealogy and practices of Soviet and post-Soviet performance, the history of Eurasian music and soundscapes, and the cultures of resistance in contemporary Russia and Kazakhstan. I have published in Slavic Review, Russian Review, Kritika, Ab Imperio, Cambridge’s Urban History, Planning Perspectives, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, and other journals. Before coming to Yale, I taught Soviet and Eurasian history as well as urban and global history in the Department of History at European University at Saint Petersburg. Before Saint Petersburg I was a postdoctoral fellow at Sciences Po Paris, France and the Albert Einstein Fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany.