Dr. Michael Loader awarded Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship

We congratulate our colleague Dr. Michael Loader, a postdoctoral fellow at IRES, upon receiving Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to be held at the University of Glasgow, for three years between 2020 and 2023. While at Glasgow Dr. Loader will be working on the project entitled “Centre-Periphery Relations in Flux: National Politics in the Soviet Borderlands”.

This project examines the radical shifts in centre-periphery relations in the post war USSR under Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin (1944-1953) and Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964). The project takes an unprecedentedly wide, and for the first time a comparative approach, to re-examining Centre (Moscow)-periphery relations and the nationalities question from the perspective of both Moscow and the non-Russian Soviet Republics with a unique and exceptional source base of never-before-seen archival documents declassified in December 2018 from the highest levels of the Soviet Communist Party. Ultimately, this project will tackle the perennial question: why did the centre-periphery relationship remain an intractable problem?

Before taking up a Postdoctoral fellowship at IRES in 2017, Michael Loader received his PhD in the history of the Soviet Union from King’s College London in 2015. He held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in 2016-2017. His research interests include the history of Soviet Latvia, the Khrushchev era USSR, nationalism and nationality policy in the Soviet Union, Soviet political purges and centre-periphery relations. His work has been published in Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, The Slavonic and East European Review and the Journal of Baltic Studies. He is also the Assistant Editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies.