SUMMARY:

This introduction to the forum places its contributions into a larger context of debates about dynamics in the fields of humanities and social sciences in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. This research perspective informed the focus of the collaborative research project “The Constitution of Humanities and Social Sciences in Russia: Networks and Circulations of Models of Knowledge from the Eighteenth Century to the 1920s.” The primary impetus for the project’s organizers came from the French academic tradition, specifically, studies of “cultural transfers,” or to use the terminology preferred by some project participants, “histoire croisée” or cultural circulation that have been popular since the 1980s. Of no less importance was the desire to modify this paradigm by introducing the approaches of imperial history and the repertoire of research problems characterizing studies of Soviet modernity.