Topic: Baptized Tatars in Orthodox Russia: Conversion, Ascription and Song
Biography:
Rebecca Mitchell joined the faculty at Middlebury College in January 2016. She studied both music and Russian language and culture at the University of Saskatchewan (B.Mus.), Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University (M.Mus.), and Carleton University (M.A.), before devoting herself to the exploration of Russian history. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011. A native of northeastern Saskatchewan (Canada), her research interests have taken her throughout Europe, the UK, and Russia. She teaches a wide range of courses on the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, comparative Communism, and the intersections between music and power in history. Her first book, Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), examines the interrelationship between imperial identity, nationalist tensions, philosophical ideals, and musical life in the final years of the Russian Empire (1905-1917). This book won the 2016 W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, awarded biennially by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for an author’s first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past. She has received research funding from numerous sources, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, and the University of Illinois Department of History.
Publications:
Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics and the Twilight of the Russian Empire, 1905-1917 (Yale University Press, January 2016).
“Music and Russian Identity in War and Revolution, 1914-1922.” The Cultural History of Russia in the Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922, ed. Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven Marks and Melissa Stockdale (Slavica Publishers, 2014), 221-243.
“How Russian was Wagner? Russian Campaigns to Defend or Destroy the German Composer during the Great War (1914-1917),” in Wagner in Russia, Poland and the Czech Lands – Musical, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Anastasia Belina-Johnson and Stephen Muir (Ashgate, 2013), 51-71.
“In Search of Orpheus: Music and Irrationality in late imperial Russia, 1905-1917.” Forthcoming in Irratsional’noe v russkoi istorii [The Irrational in Russian History], ed. Julia Mannherz (Germanskii istoricheskii institut v Moskve, 2016).
Recent Papers and Invited Talks:
“Embracing Melancholy: Rachmaninoff, ‘Russianness’ and the Politics of Musical Identity after 1917”. Presented at the Royal Music Association Conference (Birmingham, UK), Sept. 2015.
“Nietzsche’s Orphans: Musical Metaphysics in the Age of Russian Nationalism (1905-1917)”. Invited talk at the Aleksandr Brückner Institute (Halle, Germany), October 2015.
“Leonid Sabaneev’s Apocalypse and Musical Metaphysics after 1917”. Presented at the conference “Russian Émigré Culture: Transcending the Borders of Countries, Languages, and Disciplines” (Saarbrücken, Germany), November 2015.
“‘Shostakovich and the Jews?’: Music, Memory and Soviet Jewish Identity after World War II”. Presented at the Jewish Studies Association (Boston), December 2015.