Prof. Victoria Frede, Ph.D.

Profile

From May to June 2016 the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies had the pleasure to welcome U.S. historian Professor Victoria Frede-Montemayor, Ph.D. as Visiting Research Fellow in Munich. Frede is Associate Professor at the Department of History of the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the international academic advisory board of the Graduate School.

Professor Frede's research focuses on the history of Imperial Russia in the late 18th and 19th centuries, Russian intellectual history in comparison with other European developments, history of anti-religious thought, emotions and friendship. Her current research project, titled "Elective Affinities: Friendship in Russia, 1750-1840", centers on political elites and the impact of the sentimental cult of friendship on political hierarchies and loyalties.

In 2011, Frede published her first monograph "Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia". Therein she argues that in Russia doubts about the existence of God and finally atheism developed differently than in other European states. Russian atheism was strongly influenced by the Intelligentsia’s relationship towards the autocratic state.

Fellowship

• Visiting Research Fellow of the Graduate School in Munich, May – June 2016

Publications (selected)

Monograph

Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Atheism in the Russian Enlightenment, in: Russian Literature 75 (2014), 1-4, pp. 121-61.

Stankevič and Hegel’s Arrival in Russia, in: Studies in East European Thought 65 (2013), 3-4, pp. 159-174.

Radicals and Feelings: the 1860s, in: Mark Steinberg and Valeria Sobol (eds.): Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011), pp. 62-81.

Materialism and the Radical Intelligentsia, 1858-1863, in: Gary A. Hamburg and Randall Poole (eds.): A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 69-89.

A Radical Circle Confronts a Radical Woman: M. L. Ogareva, the Westernizers, and the Problem of Individual Self-Fulfillment, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54 (2006), 2, pp. 161-189.

Istoriia kollektivnogo razocharovaniia: druzhba, nravstvennost' i religioznost' v druzheskom krugu A. I. Gertsena – N. P. Ogareva 1830–1840, in: S. Silakova: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 49 (2001), 3, pp. 159-190.