Richard Stites Memorial Lecture Series: Alfred J. Rieber, November 7

The first in the Richard Stites Memorial Lecture Series will be delivered November 7, 2013 (5pm, ICC Auditorium) by Alfred J. Rieber of the Central European University in Budapest, Professor Emeritus of the University of Pennsylvania, and longstanding friend and colleague of Richard Stites. Dr. Rieber’s talk is titled "The Struggle over the Eurasian Borderlands: La longue durée."

Alfred J. Rieber is University Research Professor and former Head at the Department of History at the Central European University in Budapest and Alfred L. Cass Term Professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia, Princeton, Oxford, and the University of Chicago, as well as a recipient of numerous major grants and prizes, starting with participation in the first US-Soviet academic exchange program in 1958 and ranging from the Guggenheim to top national and university teaching awards. Rieber is the author, editor, or translator of 11 books, including Stalin and the French Communist Party, 1941–1947; The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, 1857–1864; Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia; and Imperial Rule. He has also published more than 50 chapters and articles, including some of the most influential and widely cited short pieces in the Russian field: on “persistent factors” in Russian foreign policy, Stalin as a “man of the borderlands,” and Russia as a “sedimentary society.” Finally, Rieber has published two historical novels under the nom de plume G. K. George. The first volume of Rieber’s magnum opus on comparative Eurasian empires, Struggle over the Eurasian Borderlands: From Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War, is in press. One of the preeminent historians of Russia and Eurasia in the world today, Alfred J. Rieber counted the late Richard Stites as a good friend.

The Richard Stites Memorial Lecture Series is part of the program of the Russian History Seminar of Washington, DC, which Richard enriched as a founding member and treasured participant. It is supported by the Georgetown Institute for Global History and the CERES program also at Georgetown, to which Richard made so many lasting contributions. For more information on the lecture series, see the Richard Stites Memorial Lecture Series.

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