Entangled Borderlands: Mapping Intra-Imperial Connections for a New Spatial History of the Late Romanov Empire
Team
Catherine Gibson – Principal Investigator
Catherine is an Associate Professor of East European Studies at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies of the University of Tartu. Her research to date has focused on the history of nationalism, language, and science in Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on the Baltic provinces of the Romanov Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is author of the book Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic (Oxford University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 University of Cambridge Baltic Geopolitics Network Publication Prize. At the Skytte Institute, she is the academic head of the Centre for Eurasian and Russian Studies (CEURUS), leads the programme committee of the annual Tartu Conference on East European and Eurasian Studies, and teaches on the Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters in Central, East European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CEERES).
Julia Malitska – Research Fellow (from 2026)
Julia Malitska, PhD in History, is a senior researcher and research coordinator at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. She is the author of the book Negotiating Imperial Rule: Colonists and Marriage in the Nineteenth-Century Black Sea Steppe (2017), which is her doctoral dissertation. Between 2019–2022, Malitska conducted her postdoctoral project on the history of vegetarian social activism in the late Romanov Empire. She has published on different aspects of the topic in peer-reviewed scholarly journals such as Media History and Global Food History. She is a co-editor of the edited volume Consumption and Advertising in Eastern Europe and Russia in the Twentieth Century (together with Magdalena Eriksroed-Burger and Heidi Hein-Kircher) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Malitska’s current project entitled “To Eat or Not to Eat: Human Health, Scientific Knowledge and the Biopolitics of Meat in Eastern Europe in 1860s–1939,” financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen), deals with the intertwined histories of food, scientific knowledge, and animals in the late Romanov Empire and early Soviet Union.
Janet Laidla – Research Fellow
Janet Laidla is Research Fellow in East European Studies at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies and a Lecturer of Estonian History at the Institute of History and Archaeology, both at the University of Tartu. Her early research (including the PhD thesis from 2017) concentrated on the early modern period (chronicle writing, history of knowledge); her more recent research concentrates on history of science of the modern period and early educated women in Estonia. She was the Principal Investigator of the project “Women at the University of Tartu before 1919” (1.01.2024-31.03.2025, funded by the Estonian Ministry of Culture) and has published on the history of science and women’s education in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire in the 19th century and in Estonia during the interwar period. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Estonian Historical Journal.
Heiko Pääbo – Research Fellow (from 2026)
Estonian Research Council Information System (ETIS) profile.
