Mark Bassin

Fellow, SCAS.
Baltic Sea Professor of the History of Ideas, Södertörn University.
Director of Research, Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University

Mark Bassin is an intellectual historian whose doctoral training—at UC Berkeley—and early career were in
the fields of political, cultural and historical geography. Before coming to Sweden, Bassin held faculty
positions at UCLA, UW-Madison, University College London, and the University of Birmingham (UK), and
he has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Chicago, Pau (France), and Copenhagen. His research
has been supported by grants and personal fellowships from the Fulbright Program, NEH, NCEEER, Kennan
Institute, Remarque Institute NYU, the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, DAAD, Institut für europäische
Geschichte (Mainz), American Academy Berlin, the Baltic Sea Foundation, the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center
(Japan), and the Russian Ministry of Higher Education.

Bassin’s research focuses on the history of geopolitics and spatial discourses of identity and politics in Russia
and Germany. His monograph The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism and the Construction of
Community in Modern Russia (Cornell UP) received an Honorable Mention in the ASEEES Reginald Zelnik Book
Prize. Bassin is currently working on discourses of neo-imperialism in post-Soviet Russia, ideologies of
Eurasianism, and the Putinist project of “Greater Eurasia.” His research at SCAS forms part of a new mono-
graph project surveying the intellectual and political history of Russian Eurasianism from the 1920s to the
present day.

Mark Bassin is in residence in the spring of 2025.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.