Mark Bassin is awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at St John's College, University of Oxford

Mark Bassin has beed awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Mark will spend the summer 2026 in Oxford, where he will continue working on a research project titled “Continental Space and the Reordering of World Politics: Halford Mackinder and the British Strand of a European Geopolitical Moment.”

This fellowship forms part of a larger project examining the emergence of continentalist geopolitical thinking in Europe (1900–1945), comparing German, Russian, and British traditions as parallel responses to shared structural pressures such as imperial rivalry, technological change, and the closure of global space. In Oxford, Bassin's primary focus is on the Halford J. Mackinder papers archived at the Bodleian Library, which are analyzed as a distinctly British imperial response within this broader European reorientation of spatial thought. The project seeks to position Mackinder alongside German Geopolitik (Carl Schmitt, Karl Haushofer) and Russian Evraziistvo (Nikolai Trubetskoi, Petr Savitskii) to demonstrate both shared structural logics and divergent national trajectories in geopolitical reasoning.