Aleksei Epishev
Graduate Student
History
Contact
Building & Room:
UH 1006
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About
I am a doctoral candidate studying the history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, with a specific interest in transnational migrations, global capitalism and race. My dissertation is the first attempt in the field to conceptualize the phenomenon of “Chinese labor” in the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union from the perspective of global capitalism, discourse of race, indentured labor, and the modern state. For this, I draw on materials from archives in the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. I examine how the Russian Empire, during its “nationalizing” stage in the late 19th and early 20th century, engages with globally defined and highly racialized concept of “Chinese labor,” better known in historiography as “coolies.” I explore this interaction from economic (the emergence of the state capitalism), political (debates on subjecthood and citizenship), and social (migration trajectories) perspectives. My case studies include the Chinese labor migration to the Russian Far East during the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in late 19th century and the Entente recruitment campaign during the First World War. I argue that the experience of employing “Chinese labor” in the construction of strategic infrastructural projects in the Russian Empire created a precedent that ultimately shaped the early Soviet experiments with forced labor in the 1920s.
My research has been supported externally by fellowships and grants from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) Institute of Transnational History of China, the Economic History Association (EHA), the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and Henry Luce Foundation, the London School of Economics (LSE) Paulsen Program and the Higher School of Economics, and internally by the UIC Graduate College, UIC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and UIC Department of History.
Before coming to Chicago, I studied history, archaeology and Russian culture in Germany and Russia and studied Chinese in China for one year. Please feel free to contact me with questions about common intellectual interests or studying history at UIC.
Education
- M.A., University of Cologne, Germany
- M.A., High School of Economics, Russia
Research Currently in Progress
Early Soviet history\Russian Empire, new imperial history, global history, postcolonial studies, cultural history, intellectual history, nationalism studies