Ksenia Robbe
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Ksenia Robbe is a Senior lecturer in European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen. She works at the interfaces of postcolonial and postsocialist, memory and time, and gender and feminist studies. She has been a visiting researcher and fellowship holder at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (2022/23), the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies (2019), the African Studies Centre in Leiden (2017) and the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town (2013).
Research Interests
Postcolonial studies, postsocialist studies, memory studies, gender studies, postsocialist transitions, contemporary Russophone literature, South African literature and culture.
Reconstituting Publics through Remembering Transitions: Facilitating Critical Engagement with the 1980-90s on Local and Transnational Scales
(collaborative project, awarded a NetIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking grant, 2021-2024)
Three decades after the radical transformations of the USSR and its satellites began in the 1980s––1990s, the topic of ‘transitioning’ from socialist states to liberal democracies remains highly contentious in Central and Eastern Europe. Over the last decade, the transitional past has been increasingly instrumentalized, by national-populist actors and in the counter-memories of their opponents. In the context of heated contestations of memory, with high political stakes, spaces for dialogue are rapidly shrinking and public spheres are becoming increasingly ‘disconnected.’
The project addresses this societal issue by engaging with memory practices of the ‘transitional period’ beyond the polarized versions. Drawing on approaches of cultural analysis of discourse and affect, critical memory studies, public history, ethnography, and intersectional study of gender and generations, we aim to develop strategies for facilitating more cohesive and at the same time more critical practices of remembering that have the potential to lead to dialogue and form reflective communities. The comparative approach will allow for developing strategies that can be used by museums and cultural organizations on a transnational (European) level based on trans-local resonances rather than top-down scripts.
The participation of the NGO Transition Dialogue, Berlin, and collaboration with museums in Poland and Germany will facilitate the execution of empirical research and its translation into concrete recommendations.
Key publications
Robbe, Ksenia (ed.) Remembering Transitions: Local Revisions and Global Crossings in Culture and Media. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023.
Robbe, Ksenia. “Remembering the Violence of (De)colonization in Southern Africa: From Witnessing to Activist Genealogies in Literature and Film.” Regions of Memory: Transnational Formations, edited by Simon Lewis, Jeffrey Olick, Joanna Wawrzyniak, and Malgorzata Pakier. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Robbe, Ksenia. “The Moral Right to Economic Crime: Remembering the Russian 1990s in a Tragic Mode in Alexey Ivanov’s Nasty Weather.” Remembering the Neoliberal Turn: Economic Change and Collective Memory in Eastern Europe After 1989, edited by Veronika Pehe and Joanna Wawrzyniak. London: Routledge, 2023. 230-246.
Latest publication
Robbe, Ksenia, and Andrei Zavadski.“‘C’mon, Turn Swan Lake on’: Memories of the 1990s at the Belarusian Protests of 2020″. Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European New Media 22 (2023) : 115-141.
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