April 10, 2014: 'Crimea in the Middle: Some Historical Context on the Current Crisis in Ukraine'
by Michelle Saport |
Thursday, April 10, 6 p.m. Carr-Gottstein Academic Center at Alaska Pacific University
Join special guest lecturer Dr. Erika Monahan, assistant professor at University of New Mexico, for a talk titled, "Crimea in the Middle: Some Historical Context on the Current Crisis in Ukraine." This event, co-sponsored by APU and the UAA Department of History, is free and open to the public.
About the speaker: Erika Monahan, a former member of the APU Masters Ski Team, is an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches Russian history from the ninth century to the present.
Monahan traveled to the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1991 as part of the People-to-People exchange organization. She studied Russian language in college. After graduating with a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1996, she got a job in Russia working for a start-up transport company owned by a Ukrainian émigré.
Her glimpse at Russia in the '90s shaped her interests as she transitioned to academia in 2000. Monahan wrote her dissertation about merchants in early modern Russia, focusing on Siberia. So, ironically, after over three years spent struggling to learn the "ins and outs" of "working with" the Russian customs administration, she spent two years in Russian archives reading Russian customs administration books. That study will soon be published as The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia.
Monahan completed her Ph.D. in 2007 and was an adjunct instructor at the University of Alaska Anchorage until beginning a tenure-track position at the University of New Mexico. In 2013, Monahan won a spot as a visiting fellow at the Davis Center at Harvard University to participate in a seminar entitled "Imperial Legacies and International Politics in the Post-Soviet Space." During her time in Russia, Monahan visited many corners of the former Soviet Union, including Karelia, Kyrgyzstan, Kamchatka and the Caucasus, as well as Kiev and Crimea.
"April 10, 2014: 'Crimea in the Middle: Some Historical Context on the Current Crisis
in Ukraine'" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.