Associate Members

Andrei Zavadski

© Konstantin Lazarev

I was a CARMAH postdoctoral researcher in 2020–2022 and remain an associate member.

When at CARMAH, I was engaged in the sub-project Realizations and Reception in the Humboldt Forum, part of CARMAH’s major research project titled Making Differences: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st Century. Together with Irene Hilden and Sharon Macdonald, I conducted ethnographic audience research in several of the Humboldt Forum’s exhibitions and investigated the participatory process behind the BERLIN GLOBAL exhibition.

Born in Belarus in 1986, I hold a BA in regional studies from MGIMO-University (2009), a dual MA in public history from the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka) and Manchester University (2014), and a PhD in media and communication studies from Freie Universität Berlin (2020). I work at intersections of memory studies, public history, museum studies, and media studies.

In 2015–2019, I was a researcher at Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute for Media and Communication Studies (Emmy Noether Group “Mediating (Semi)Authoritarianism––The Power of the Internet in the Post-Soviet World”), where I also defended my PhD (2020). Titled “Mnemonic Counterpublics: Challenging the Political Regime in Russia with Memories of the 1990s,” it looks at how memories of the past can become a constituent element of counterpublics in non-democratic contexts. The project analysed a number of offline and online projects (including the museum exposition of The Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Yekaterinburg) that actualised countermemories of the 1990s in Russia and thus resisted the narrative of the “turbulent (rowdy) 90s” imposed by the authorities.

I am a co-founder of the Public History Laboratory, a collective created in 2015 to promote dialogue between academic historians and various publics, and of The February Journal, an independent interdisciplinary peer-reviewed publication created in 2022.

For more information, please see my personal website and my ORCID page.