Baumann Fabian | Department of History

Department
of History

Prof. Dr. Fabian Baumann

Professor (SNF-Professur Baumann)

Office

Hirschgässlein 21
4051 Basel
Schweiz

Contact

fabian.baumann@unibas.ch

+41 61 207 46 47

Bio

I am a historian of Eastern Europe, with a focus on the history of nationalism and empire in Russia, Ukraine, and East Central Europe. My book Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism, published by NIU Press/Cornell University Press, was awarded the 2024 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize for an author’s first published monograph of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past, as well as the 2025 Alexander Nove Prize in Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies. Tracing the story of a family that included both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists, Dynasty Divided analyzes what prompted nineteenth-century intellectuals to identify with either one or another imagined community. I argue that these men and women consciously chose a political position and only then began their self-fashioning as members of a national community, defying the notion of nationalism as a consequence of a pre-existing ethnicity. I have also worked on a postdoctoral research project about “banal” forms of nationalism and the promotion of republican statehood in late Soviet Ukraine.

My current research project focuses on the prosecution of purported traitors and enemies of the state in the First Czechoslovak Republic. Forged from disparate post-imperial territories after the end of World War I, Czechoslovakia was a precarious republic threatened by various authoritarian currents among its population. Political groups of dubious state loyalty included Sudeten German nationalists, Hungarian irredentists, Slovak autonomists, Czech fascists, and communists. Trying to protect national unity and the “democratic-republican order,” the state enacted far-reaching legislation to act against its enemies, most notoriously the 1923 Law for the Protection of the Republic. At the same time, trials against purported traitors and enemies of the state often created an opportunity for societal debates about the meaning of loyalty and enmity towards the republic, laying bare the anxieties of the state’s defenders and the hopes of its enemies. Shedding light on the intertwined dynamics of state-building and disloyalty, the project will contribute to an ongoing reassessment of the region’s most stable democracy and the precarious efforts to protect it from authoritarian encroachment.

I am also the co-editor, with Olena Palko and Börries Kuzmany of the first English-language Handbook of Ukrainian History, which is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press in 2028.

Curriculum Vitae

2026-: SNSF Assistant Professor, University of Basel
2023-2026: Research Associate, Heidelberg University
2023: SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellow, RECET, University of Vienna
2021–2022: SNSF Postdoc.Mobility Fellow, University of Chicago
2020–2021: Assistant Lecturer, University of Basel
2020: PhD in East European History, University of Basel (summa cum laude)
2016–2020: SNSF Doc.CH Fellow, University of Basel
2014: M.Phil in Slavonic Studies, University of Oxford
2012: BA in Russian and English Language, Literature, and Civilization, University of Geneva

Publications

Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: NIU Press, an Imprint of Cornell University Press 2023).

Ukrainian translation: Rozdilena dynastiia: Rodynna istoriia rosiis’koho i ukraïns’koho natsionalizmiv, translated by Les’ Belei(L’viv: Lokal’na istoriia 2025).

“How (Not) to Betray Democracy: Czechoslovakia’s 1923 Law for the Protection of the Republic and the ‘Democratic-Republican State Form,’” Střed. Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies of Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries, no. 2 (2026), 7–32.

“‘Well-Known and Sincerely Loved’: Banal Nationalism, Republican Pride, and Symbolic Ethnicity in Late Soviet Ukraine,” Slavic Review 84, no. 1 (2025), 115–37.

“Ukraine in Rot. Imperiales Gewaltregime und Institutionalisierung der ukrainischen Nation,” Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West 9 (2023), 11–14.

“Von Krieg zu Krieg: Historische Ukraineforschung seit 2014,” Osteuropa 72, no. 1–3 (2022): 309–318.

“Nationality as Choice of Path: Iakov Shul’gin, Dmitrii Pikhno, and the Russian-Ukrainian Crossroads,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 23, no. 4 (2022), 743–71.

“Revisiting Soviet Modernity in the non-Russian Periphery,” Euxeinos. Culture and Governance in the Black Sea Region 12, no. 34 (2022) (with Olena Palko).

“Einseitiger Einheitswunsch – Putins neueste Geschichtslektion,” Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West 9 (2021), 3–5.

“Enthusiasm, Disillusionment, and Enemization on the Pages of Kievlianin in the Spring of 1917.” In Franziska Schedewie, Dennis Dierks, eds., Imagining the Future in Russia’s February Revolution (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2026).

“From National Indifference to Indifferent Nationality? The Ukrainian Masses and Nationhood in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.” In Petru Negură et al., eds., Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands: Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940. (London: Bloomsbury, 2025), 23–43.

“Hiking Boots and Peasant Shirts: National Science, Self-Fashioning, and the Ukrainophile Tradition of Scholarly Travel”. In Jörn Happel et al., eds., Discovering, Surveying, Ordering: Expeditions in the Long Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2024), 111–139 (with Martin Rohde).

“Russischer und ukrainischer Nationalismus und die Ursprünge anti-ukrainischer Feindbilder im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Fraziska Davies, ed., Die Ukraine in Europa: Traum und Trauma einer Nation (Darmstadt: wbg Theiss, 2023), 82–100.

“Between Empires: Ukraine in the Nineteenth Century.” In Olena Palko and Manuel Férez Gil, eds., Ukraine’s Many Faces: Land, People and Culture Revisited (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2023), 83–90.

“Entre imperios: La Ucrania al siglo XIX.” In Olena Palko and Manuel Férez Gil, eds., Descrubriendo Ucrania: su pueblo, su historia, y su cultura (Beccar, Argentina: Poliedro Editorial de la Universidad de San Isidro, 2022), 36–41.

Review of Börries Kuzmany, Vom Umgang mit nationaler Vielfalt. Eine Geschichte der nicht-territorialen Autonomie in Europa, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 73, no. 1, 2025, 145–47.

Review of Serhiy Bilenky, Laboratory of Modernity: Ukraine between Empire and Nation, 1772-1914, Acta Poloniae Historica, vol. 130, 2024, 127–32.

Review of Anna Veronika Wendland, Befreiungskrieg: Nationsbildung und Gewalt in der Ukraine, H-Soz-Kult, 19 December 2023.

Review of Alexa von Winning, Intimate Empire: The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855–1936, Slavic Review, vol. 82, no. 2, 2023, 533–34.

Review of Andriy Zayarnyuk and Ostap Sereda, The Intellectual Foundations of Modern Ukraine: The Nineteenth Century, Russian Review, vol. 82, no. 3, 2023, 560–61.

Review of John Connelly, From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 70, no. 1–2, 2022, 227–29.

Review of Olena Palko, Making Ukraine Soviet: Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin, History: The Journal of the Historical Association, vol. 107, no. 374, 2022, 188–90.

Review of Stephan Rindlisbacher and Dimitri Tolkatsch (eds.), Die heutige Ukraine und ihre sowjetischen Wurzeln, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 69, no. 4, 2021, 697–700.

Review of Trevor Erlacher, Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes. An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Dontsov, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 69, no. 4, 2021, 676–78.

Review of Serhiy Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905, East/West Journal of Ukrainian Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2019, 231–33.

“Er befragte das Stör-Orakel,” FAZ, 17 December 2025, 5.

“Bez Bromu Podcast: Natsionalizm: radykal'na ideia XIX stolittia? Rol' intelektualiv ta pershi natsionalisty,” 16 October 2025.

“Warum das Studienfach Osteuropäische Geschichte so politisch ist,” Swissinfo, 24 September 2025. (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian versions available on website.)

Interview with Modul’ znan’, Radio Kul’tura (Ukraine), 19 September 2025.

“The Eurasian Knot Podcast: A Tale of Two Nationalisms, 16 December 2024.

“IR Thinker Youtube Channel: Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism,” 2 December 2024.

Anna Oliinyk, “Etnichne pokhodzhennia ne bulo vyrishal’nym, koly ishlos’ pro natsional’nu loial’nist’.” Interview with Lokal’na istoriia, no. 9 (2024), 30–37.

“The Slavic Connexion Podcast: Dynasty Divided. A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism,” 19 May 2024.

“Krieg in der Ukraine – wie weiter?” Interview with Telebasel, 15 December 2023.

“New Books Network History Ex Silo Podcast: The Family in History, History in the Family. National Identity in Nineteenth-century Kyiv and Immigration Politics in West Germany after 1955,” 21 October 2023.

“Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism. Author interview with Fabian Baumann,” Peripheral Histories?, 2 October 2023.