Oleg Morozov
- PhD student
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About
Oleg Morozov is a historian and memory scholar interested in new approaches to memory studies, public history and cultural history. A recipient of the Hill Foundation and Cambridge Trust Scholarship, he is currently working on his second PhD on the queer culture of remembrance and the heteronormative politics of history in post-Soviet Russia.
Oleg holds a BA in Translation and Area Studies from the Faculty of Foreign Languages of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. He graduated from the HSE University in Moscow with an MA in History with distinction. In 2016, he obtained his first doctoral degree (summa cum laude) in Russian and European history. His dissertation examined how universities in the Russian and German Empires invented their pasts on the eve of World War I and used historical jubilees as commemorative events to strengthen their links to the monarchies and promote nationalism and militarism. In 2014, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Mandel Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC.
From 2014 to 2022, he taught history and memory at the HSE University, where, from 2017 onwards, he was annually recognised as the best lecturer. In 2021 and 2022, he taught the history of post-Soviet Russia as a Visiting Lecturer at the Middlebury School in Russia and the International Christian University in Tokyo. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he left for Germany, where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher and visiting lecturer at Tübingen University until 2024.
Oleg presented at international conferences and workshops at the universities of London, Newcastle, Tübingen, Freiburg, Heidelberg, Düsseldorf, Luxembourg and Warsaw and Polish and Taiwanese Academies of Sciences. He is a member of the Memory Studies Association, the International Federation for Public History and the International Commission for the History of Universities.
Supervisor: Dr Daria Ezerova
Scholarships/Prizes
• Hill Foundation and Cambridge Trust Scholarship (2024-2027)
• Best HSE Lecturer (2017-2022)
• Academic Merit Bonus at the HSE University (2018)
• German Historical Institute’s grant for doctoral students (2014)
• HSE doctoral scholarship (2013-2015)
Fellowships
• Postdoctoral fellowship from Sonderforschungsbereich 923 ‘Bedrohte Ordnungen’ at Tübingen University (2022-2023)
• Paulsen Fellowship from the London School of Economics and Political Science (2018)
• Fellowship from the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in the US (2014)
Selected Publications
• “Між самовіктимизацією і спільною пам’яттю: війна Росії проти України в російських незалежних медіа.” Політичні дослідження. (forthcoming in 2025)
• “Die Russische Orthodoxe Kirche und die Institutionalisierung der politischen Homophobie in Russland,” in Topoi und Netzwerke der religiösen Rechten, ed. Dominik Gautier, Hans-Ulrich Probst (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2024), 45-78.
• “Das Justiz- und Strafverfolgungssystem als Erinnerungsakteure: die Entstehung eines repressiven Erinnerungsregimes in Putins Russland.” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 75 (2024): 189-203.
• “Selbstviktimisierung: Russlands Angriffskrieg gegen die Ukraine in den russischen Exilmedien.” Osteuropa 14 (2023): 103-114.
• “Komplizenschaft: Die ‘Kriegstheologie’ des Moskauer Patriarchats.” Religion & Geschichte in Ost und West 4 (2023): 18-20.
• “Kriterii ocenivanija nauchnyh tekstov v recenzijah vtoroj poloviny XIX veka: Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshhenija.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 150 (2018): 129-138.
• “Vilgelm fon Gumboldt i Berlinskij universitet: Novyj vzgljad na proishozhdenie ‘gumboldtovskogo mifa.’” Dialog so vremenem 60 (2017): 128-141.
• “Wilhelm von Humboldt and Berlin University: A New Look at the Origin of the Humboldt Myth.” HSE Working Papers 134 (2016): 1-17.
• “Nesostojavshijsja prazdnik: 100-letnij jubilej Imperatorskogo Kazanskogo universiteta.” Rossijskaja istorija 2 (2016): 192–203.
• “The Historical Past of Tübingen University within the 1927 Jubilee Context.” History of Education and Children’s Literature 9 (2014): 301–320.
• “Legendy i mify rossijskoj istorii: istoricheskaja politika Russkoj pravoslavnoj cerkvi v nachale XXI veka,” in Montazh i demontazh sekuljarnogo mira, ed. Sergej Filatov, Aleksej Malashenko (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014), 255-322.
https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0002-8386-9873
https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=58576999700
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Oleg-Morozov-4/research
Research
Oleg’s PhD thesis at Cambridge looks into how Russian political homophobia manifests itself through the repressive politics of history aimed at creating hegemonic historical narratives that destroy all unofficial memories, including queer ones. The PhD project combines developments in memory and trauma studies with those of queer history and queer theory to examine (1) what strategies the Kremlin and Russian state-affiliated memory makers, such as the Russian Orthodox Church and anti-LGBTQ+ scholars, use to mnemonicide queer narratives; (2) how queer people create their own remembering collectives online and offline to preserve their identities and combat homophobia.
Following the outbreak of ‘memory mania’ in the humanities, the Kremlin’s politics of history has attracted the interest of historians over the past 20 years. However, no one has yet examined its repressive effects on Russian LGBTQ+. Queer scholars still have only a vague idea of how queer memories are produced in Russia and how, if at all, they have helped Russian LGBTQ+ to popularise their culture, combat heteronormativity and overcome the collective trauma of Soviet repression. This PhD project will provide further insight into how queer communities deal with these problems, which may be of use to future historians and memory scholars working with individual and collective memories, and also help queers come up with a self-reflexive culture of remembrance, which will protect them from further persecution.