Alexander Etkind defended his PhD in Russian cultural history in Helsinki (1998) and has supervised more than thirty PhD students in Europe. He has been a professor at the Central European University in Vienna, where he founded the Open Society Hub for Politics of Anthropocene (2022–2026); at the European University Institute at Florence (2013–2022); and at Cambridge University, where he was also a fellow of King’s College (2004–2013). He is the author of many books on cultural and intellectual history, most recently Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021) and Russia Against Modernity (Polity Press, 2023, now available in ten languages, including German and Ukrainian). His current interests are climate politics, comparative history of empires, colonialism and decolonization in Eastern Europe, and critical theory of revanchism.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Etkind, Alexander, and Johanna Gautier-Morin. “After Midnight: On Catastrophic Learning”. European Review of Books, 28 August 2025. https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/after-midnight/.
- Etkind, Alexander. Russia Against Modernity. Polity Press, 2023.
- Etkind, Alexander. “Ukraine, Russia, and Genocide of Minor Differences”. Journal of Genocide Research. 7 June 2022: 384–402. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2022.2082911.
- Etkind, Alexander. Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources. Polity Press, 2021.
- Etkind, Alexander. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied. Stanford University Press, 2013.
CURE RESEARCH PROJECT
Mourning and Hope in the Processes of Reparation and Rehabilitation: A Perspective of Cultural History
CURE research project 2026/27