Dina Khapaeva, a professor in the Ivan Allen College School of Modern Languages, has received an invited professorship to The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS, Paris, France). A world leading research institution and post-doctoral school, the EHESS was the home institution of Pierre Bourdieu, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, François Furet, Fernand Brodel, among many other outstanding scholars.

Khapaeva will deliver four lectures on current Russian ideology and politics. These will examine public support for President Vladimir Putin’s politics, including the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. Her lectures will encompass four major elements of Putin’s ideology that propelled his regime to popularity: anti-Western cultural conservatism, rehabilitation of Stalinism, nationalism and promotion of a new Russian medievalism, or so-called Eurasianism. She proposes a synthetic concept of Gothic society to explain how Putin’s ideology supports the emerging attitudes to people and a new social order in the post-Soviet Russia.