Name: Timur Atnashev
Chair: Slavic Literatures (Prof. Klavdia Smola)
Institute: Institute of Slavic Studies
Faculty: Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies

Timur Atnashev is an intellectual historian of the Soviet, Russian, and European political languages and political philosophy. From the beginning of October until the end of the year, he will be a visiting fellow at the Chair of Slavic Literatures.

Timur Atnashev graduated in sociology from Moscow State University Lomonosov, earned his MA degree in political thought at Sciences Po de Paris and then defended PhD in History and Civilization in European University Institute Florence where he followed the seminars of Prof. Martin Van Gelderen (Universität Göttingen).

He has worked extensively on the late-Soviet period, perestroika and early 1990s publishing a series of articles in Russian, French and English the leading academic journals. Together with Michael Velizhev (HSE, Sapienza University Rome) they published and co-edited a number of books critically developing the Cambridge school methodology, including the translation and scientific correction of the Russian translations of the key articles by Q. Skinner, J. A. G. Pocock,  M. van Helderen and others, as well as studies of the public sphere.

In 2019-2020 Timur supervised the first Russian translation of Pocock’s opus magnum “Machiavellian Moment” in NLO publishing house. Starting from 2017 Timur Atnashev served as the co-organizer and host of the monthly Shaninka seminar on intellectual history along with M. Velizhev and Andrei Zorin (Oxford) with more than 100 renowned specialists participated as reporters or discussants in several fields: cultural anthropology, Cambridge School, microhistory, Begriffsgeschichte, discourse analysis, social capital theory and the history of emotions. 

In 2020 Timur Atnashev joined NLO, one of the most significant and one of the last independent publishing houses in social sciences and humanities in Russia, as an editor of the Intellectual history series. Around the same time, he undertook a series of some thirty interviews with the specialists of political philosophy in Russia in order to assess the state-of-art of the discipline. The first interviews were published in the influential online journal Republic.ru – now the journal is deemed “foreign agent” as well as many of the interlocutors. Timur also contributed to the public debates on Liberal.ru and Colta.ru

The last book published and co-edited by Timur Atnashev along with Tatiana Vaizer and M. Velizhev is reconstructing the 200 years of the evolution of regimes of publicity in Russia and USSR, and revisiting the theoretical foundations of the public sphere studies.  

What are your main interests as a researcher? Which topics do you focus on?
Intellectual history, public debates during perestroika in USSR, political philosophy, public sphere and regimes of publicity, bureaucracy, Cambridge school of intellectual history.  

What was your most interesting research topic so far?
Political philosophy and public debates during perestroika and
the evolution of the left-right spectrum (work in progress) 

What does your current research focus on?
The global intellectual history of the left-right spectrum in its relationship to historical imagination and the historiosophy of progress.

Which item do you absolutely need at your workplace?
Access to bureaus and possibly a library (I have my laptop with me, so no other urgent needs),

Do you have a favourite quote? If so, what is it and from whom?
I like re-reading with students Marcus Aurelius. Just one of many: “We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that”.

Which book did you recently read? / Which movie/series did you watch recently?
I am finishing now “Ego, Hunger and Aggression” by Fredrick Perls. The last series I watched was “New Pope” by Sorrentino.

More information about you can be found:
https://www.msses.ru/about/teachers/atnashev-timur-mikhaylovich/