Galym-Galam: Curtis Murphy, Assistant Professor of NU SSH

A new guest of ‘Galym-Galam’ rubric is Curtis Murphy, Assistant Professor at NU SSH.?He grew up in the South of the United States in a very homogenous area dominated by American Protestant culture, that’s why Professor Curtis always wanted to learn about parts of the world that did not feature in U.S. media and popular history. He became particularly attracted to the History of Eastern Europe as a subject poorly understood and often treated dismissively in historical accounts. Now Dr. Murphy is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the Russian Empire.?Since his arrival in Kazakhstan, he has realized that Central Asia and Eastern Europe are often subject to the same kinds of condescending, reproachful treatment in English language sources.

Can you please tell us about your educational and professional background?

My current career path began when I somewhat capriciously decided to take Russian as a foreign language at my undergraduate university. I say capriciously because I have no ethnic or other connection to the language, but again I have always been drawn to what for me was unknown.

I eventually became a History Major and concentrated in Russian and East European History. I completed by M.A. and Ph.D. at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, during which time I conducted research in the libraries and archives of Poland, Ukraine and Russia. In addition to Russian, I learned Polish and Ukrainian, and I became particularly interested in the former colonial peripheries of the Russian Empire and the pre-imperial political traditions of former countries such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. I completed my Ph.D. in 2011 with a dissertation on the transformation of cities in Poland and Ukraine after their incorporation into the Austrian and Russian Empires.

Before I came to Kazakhstan, I worked for three years as a history instructor at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, and I also taught for a year as a visiting professor at Georgetown. In 2018, I published my first book,?From Citizens to Subjects: City, State and the Enlightenment in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus?in 2018 with the University of Pittsburgh Press. I have also written articles on Jewish-Christian relations in the eighteenth-century, including an account of a previously unknown ritual murder trial.

Since coming to NU, I have increasingly focused my research on connections between Central Europe and Central Asia. I recently wrote a paper on Polish ethnographers of the Kazakh steppe and the Caucasus in the nineteenth century. I am currently working on an article about the Polish-Muslim adventurer Micha? Czajkowski, a chapter on the French Revolution and Cities for the?Cambridge Urban History of Europe, and an article on the Polish-Lithuanian Parliament and the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774. Since coming to Nazarbayev University, I have had the opportunity to conduct additional research in Lithuania, Belarus, and Almaty, which has informed some of my recent publications.

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Can you please tell us about your current research project?

My main interest at the moment is multiethnic and multireligious interaction within empires. We know that Soviet Kazakhstan was the land “of a thousand languages” and multinational diversity remains an attribute of independent Kazakhstan. I am interested in how empires consciously and unconsciously foster interactions between variegated peoples, and I am investigating how such links and connections influence might individual and collective identity.?

I am currently investigating real and imagined connections between Polish and Ukrainian revolutionaries on the one hand, and the independence movements of Turkic-Muslim peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia in the nineteenth-century and the early Soviet period. Now that Kazakhstan is no longer in the Soviet Union, I think it is fruitful to look at resistance to imperial rule in the context of independence movements across the empire. Did various nationalities sympathize with one another’s plight or did each group largely focus on its own goals and needs? To what extent did cultural exchange result in new identities that defied the categories later created by nationalist writers and historians?

I have already visited archives in Poland and Kazakhstan to conduct preliminary research on this project, and I have received a fellowship from American Councils, which will allow me to conduct archival research in Russia this summer.?

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What are your key research findings?

As a historian, one of my main tasks is to investigate and contest the narratives and myths that develop around historical events. We often understand and make sense of the world through stories about the past which, upon closer inspection, have little connection to reality. This is particularly dangerous in the field of international relations, as we see in the crisis between Russia and Ukraine. Each side has its own, mutually incompatible view of the past, complete with its own cast of mutually incompatible heroes and villains. Historical personages such as Mazepa, Peter I, Petliura, and Bandera play diametrically opposing roles in Ukrainian and Russian historical narratives, a fact that makes finding common ground elusive.

One of the main narratives that I challenge in most of my work is the so-called “progress” narrative of European development, which holds that the countries of eastern Europe become colonial subjects because they failed to match of economic and social development of western Europe. This is a completely self-serving version of event and an apology for empire which could equally apply to the history of Kazakhstan. In my first book, using archival evidence from Poland and Ukraine, I showed that the narrative of Enlightenment-era progress and development led from above did not match the reality on the ground. Reforms meant to improve people’s social-economic position often resulted in the opposite effect and undermined local customs and practices. I have also showed that state-lead efforts to promote religious tolerance were often significantly less effective than the informal compromises and agreements reached at the local level.

In the case of Central Asia, I found that Polish and Ukrainian observers—despite the fact that they themselves were colonized peoples—tended to evaluate the customs and behaviors of the Kazakh people from the Enlightenment-influenced perspective of Russian administrators. In fact, presumptions about what was civilized and progressive often proved the biggest mental barrier to cooperation between Europeans and Central Asians, even in cases where individuals supposedly sought out assistance from the other.

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Why did you choose to join NU?

When I applied for this job, I already knew a number of colleagues working here, and they encouraged me to come. They told me that the students were among the best they had taught, and I knew I would be relatively comfortable in an environment where Russian is used as it is one of the languages that I speak. I have found the students to be excellent, and it has been a great pleasure to teach topics on empire and nation to students who already have some insight into these matters. I particularly enjoy teaching students here about the history of Central and Eastern Europe as many of the topics—imperial conquest, Communist transformation, post-Soviet nation building—have obvious parallels in the history of Kazakhstan. People in every country often focus on their own national histories, but comparative history broadens our perspective offers more effective resources for analyzing information and understanding our place in the world. I would like to think that I have helped students acquire these resources, as I have certainly learned quite a bit from teaching them.

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What are your future plans?

I hope to continue researching topics that connect my original area of interest in eastern Europe to Central Asia. I began learning Kazakh and other Turkish languages since I arrived in Kazakhstan, and I have a goal of incorporating more local historiography and perspectives into my research. Since my goal has always been to challenge the condescending, enlightened assumptions of Europeans, I must necessarily locate the perspective of the imperial subjects. Finding these voices has always been a challenge for historians, but?I hope one day to contribute towards this effort.