Marlene Laruelle (Image provided)
Marlene Laruelle, a research professor of international affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, will deliver the annual Kenneth Roemer Lecture on World Affairs at SUNY Geneseo. Her talk, "Making Sense of Russia: Putin’s Fourth Term and its Implications for Russia and the World,” will take place March 22 at 4 p.m. in the Doty Recital Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
"Given the recent elections in the U.S., and Europe and Italy, the challenge of Russia to the West, and Putin's probable re-election this month, Professor Laruelle is an ideal specialist to provide insight into the role of identity, nationalism and geopolitics in Putin's policies," said Robert Goeckel, professor of political science and international relations at Geneseo.
Laruelle received her Ph.D. in history from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures in Paris. At the George Washington University, Laruelle also serves as the associate director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), and as the director of the Central Asia Program. She is also the co-director of PONARS (Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia), an international network of scholars whose core mission includes developing policy-relevant scholarship on and in Russia and Eurasia through collaborative research.
Laruelle, a prolific author, explores Russia’s political culture through the lens of ideologies and national identity issues. Her books include Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), and In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (Palgrave, 2009). Her next book, Russia and the Symbolic Landscape of Fascism, will be published in late 2018 by Pittsburgh University Press.
The Kenneth Roemer Lecture on World Affairs is a memorial to Roemer's longstanding interest in global issues. The series was endowed by his brother, the late Spencer J. Roemer, emeritus director of admissions at Geneseo and member of the Geneseo Foundation Board of Directors.