Sablin returns to Heidelberg University with a team of researchers to work on the ERC project “Entangled Parliamentarisms: Constitutional Practices in Russia, Ukraine, China and Mongolia, 1905-2005” at the Department of History. “The ERC Grant is a fantastic opportunity to develop a major collaborative project on a topic of particular interest to me,” he states. “The whole idea of a fully independent research project developed from scratch is, perhaps, the best present a researcher can get. I have strong interest in Russian, Chinese, Ukrainian, and Mongolian history and always wanted to unite them in one study, as their histories were deeply interconnected in the twentieth century — and still are.”
The project addresses the entangled histories of deliberative decision-making, political representation and constitutionalism on the territories of the former Russian and Qing Empires and focuses on the cases of Russia, Ukraine, China and Mongolia between 1905 and 2005. Employing the perspectives of the New Imperial History and Transcultural Studies, the project overcomes narrow state-centered approaches and takes advantage of multidisciplinary methodology crossing history and political science.
It traces parliamentary developments, the interactions among imperial and post-imperial intellectuals and their engagement in global discussions, shared imperial legacies, mutual borrowings and references, imperial and post-imperial political practices and translatability of concepts. It seeks to refute the stereotypes about inclinations towards democracy in particular national contexts by tracing relevant transnational practices and interactions and providing a nuanced political and intellectual history of parliamentarism. The research group will consist of five people including three PhD studentships.
“Heidelberg University has a very open-minded Department of History, which has consistently broken new theoretical and regional grounds, and several prominent research centres with regional specialization,” Sablin explains his choice of university. “In this project, I would like to have intellectual history and history of concepts to be the main theoretical approaches, and it was Heidelberg where both of them have been extensively developed.”
Sablin finished his PhD at the Cluster “Asia and Europe” in 2014 and now thinks about collaborating with the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies for his project. “Although the project is based at the Chair for East European History, I am very interested in going beyond regional focus and breaching the divide between different Area Studies. I think that both the HCTS, which has especially strong focus on East and South Asia, and my project can benefit from our cooperation.”
The European Research Council awards the Starting Grant to excellent young researchers. Funding is awarded based on their scientific excellence and the innovative potential of their research ideas.
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