Robert I. Frost, September 4
The Russian History Seminar will hold its first meeting of the 2014-2015 academic year on Friday, September 4, 4pm in ICC 662 on the Georgetown University campus. (Note that this is a different start time than the regularly scheduled 5pm start time.) Robert I. Frost (University of Aberdeen) will present, “On Unions: The Polish-Lithuanian Union (1385 –1795) and Composite States in Early Modern Europe.” This is a talk (no paper) co-sponsored with the Early Modern Seminar.
Robert I. Frost holds the Burnett Fletcher Chair in History at the University of Aberdeen. Born and brought up in Edinburgh, he was educated at St Andrews University, the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, where he wrote a doctorate under the supervision of Professor Norman Davies. His main research interests lie in the history of Eastern Europe from the 14th to the 18th centuries. His first book, After the Deluge: Poland-Lithuania and the Second Northern War (Cambridge University Press, 1993) was a study of the political impact on Poland-Lithuania of the series of wars which engulfed it after the great Cossack rebellion of 1648-54. His second book developed these themes across a much wider chronological period and with an expanded geographical focus. It set out to examine Michael Roberts’s theory of the Military Revolution in the context of the wars of northern and eastern Europe. This was published as The Northern Wars: War State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558 – 1721 (Longmans, 2000), which won the 2005 Early Slavic Studies Association Distinguished Scholarship Award. In 2015, the first of his two-volume study, The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania, was published as The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385-1569.