Eileen Kane
Assistant Professor of History
Joined Connecticut College: 2008
Education
AB, Brown University; MA, PhD, Princeton University
Specializations
Modern Europe
The Russian Empire/USSR
Islam in Europe
The hajj in the modern era
Eileen Kane is a historian of modern Europe interested in comparative, global approaches to history. Within Europe her research and teaching focus on modern Russia, and she always seeks to consider Russia's history within broader histories of Europe and the world. She is especially interested in the history of empires and imperialism; the transformative effects of empire on Europe; religion; human mobility in the modern era; and Islam in Europe and under European imperial rule.
At Connecticut College, Professor Kane teaches broad and specialized courses on Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, including a survey of modern European history (from the 1790s to the 1990s), individual courses on the Russian Empire and the USSR, a seminar on Muslim Lives in Russia, and an introductory course on the history of Eurasia that begins with the Mongol Empire and ends with the Soviet Union.
Kane is on leave during the 2011-2012 academic year completing revisions to her first book project, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca. Her book looks at how Russia, like other European imperial powers, began to sponsor the hajj in the nineteenth century. Framed as both a social history of human mobility and a study of how Islamic inheritances shaped Russia's imperial evolution, it reconstructs the sprawling international infrastructure that the tsarist state built between the 1840s and 1910s to facilitate the mass movement of its Muslims between Russia and Mecca.
When she returns to campus in fall 2012, she will be teaching HIS 106: From the Mongols to the Soviets: An Introduction to Eurasian History, and HIS 264: The Russian Empire, 1700-1920s.
Selected publications:
"Odessa as a Hajj Hub, 1880s-1910s," in Russia in Motion: Essays on the Politics, Society, and Culture of Human Mobility, 1850-Present, ed. John Randolph and Eugene Avrutin (University of Illinois Press, 2012)
Visit the history department website.
