Orel Beilinson; Visiting Fellowship 2022/23
I am a historian of modern Europe in a Eurasian context, finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale University. My dissertation, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me: Coming of Age in the Other Europe, 1813–1914,” studies how the transition to adulthood changed in Europe’s “bourgeois century.” Each chapter of its first part studies a different life course – land inheritors, rural and urban servants, future artisans, emigrating youth, and university students – from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Then, the shorter second part asks how youth emerged in the political sphere, how youth movements emerged, and how youth power was depicted in fiction between Romanticism and Modernism.
My work incorporates a macro-sociological lens, a synthetic approach, and a sensitivity to language. My early studies included Semitic philology, early Islamic studies, and Russian imperial history. While I focus on other topics now, I retain the desire to build large frameworks and construct broad narratives that explain social change. This desire has accompanied me throughout my studies. Also accompanying me is a wide range of languages I have been studying since my first classes at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies. My work utilizes sources in most Ottoman and Habsburg languages.
Visiting fellowship June-July, 2023
I am coming to the Institute of Contemporary History after a year and a half of library work. Since January 2022, I have worked in Switzerland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Israel, Austria, Czechia, and Slovakia. These trips – alongside earlier work in Georgia and work from a distance in Albania and Poland – have formed the backbone of my dissertation. My fellowship at the Institute, thus, comes at a transitory moment between finalizing my dissertation and embarking on a post-doctoral project.
Three goals bring me to Ljubljana:
1. Archival work in Slovenia and Croatia, especially on the intersection between language, education, and social inequality. I am lucky to have received an APE Research Grant from the Archival Portal European Foundation. Their funding will allow me to conduct this research in Ljubljana’s archives and libraries and in Maribor, Celje, Ptuj, Koper, Zagreb, Rijeka, and Pazin.
2. Forging stronger connections in Slovenia. My work exposed me to Slovenia’s rich historiographical tradition in Slovenia. Shared projects and conferences have sprouted interactions with Slovene scholars, both at the Institute and at other Slovene universities, which I hope to strengthen while in residence. I am especially interested in Dr. Remec’s project on Suicide and Its Perceptions in Slovenia, 1850–2000; Dr. Panjek's longue durée study of Tomaj, and Dr. Stergar’s project on schools and identifications/identities.
3. So far, I have been a passive user of Slovene. My advanced command of Serbo-Croatian overpowers my Slovene and Bulgarian when I try to speak and write: perhaps a long enough stay in Slovenia would change that!
Selected publications:
“What is Austro-Hungarian History to the Eurasianist?” Journal of Austrian Studies 56, no. 2 (2023): 21–30.
“Is Adolescence Culturally Transferred? Is it Universal? Why Should the Social Historian Care?” In Cultural Transfer Europe-Serbia: Methodological Issue and Challenges, ed. Slobodan G. Markovich (Belgrade: Faculty of Political Sciences, 2023), 175–86.
“Social Stratification and Job Market Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe,” Journal of Social History 56, no. 2 (2022): 439–62.
“Female Rule in Imperial Russia: Is Gender a Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” In A Companion to Global Queenship: An Examination of Female Rule and Political Agency in the Premodern World, ed. Elena Woodacre. Bradford: ARC Humanities Press, 2018.
“Judentum, Islam und Russische Revolution: Betrachtungen aus der Sicht vergleichender Geschichtswissenschaft” [Judaism, Islam, and the Russian Revolution: Observations from Comparative History], Arbeit - Bewegung - Geschichte 15, no. 2 (2017): 65–84.
“Tolstoy in the Caucasus: Noble Savages and Imperialist Identities” in Critical Insights: Leo Tolstoy, ed. Rachel Stauffer. Ipswich: Salem Press, 2017.
