Marina Mogilner: How can rethinking borders reshape history’s telling

How can rethinking the borders of nations and states change our understanding of history?

Marina Mogilner has asked this question for more than 35 years as she lived through historic changes in the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. Growing up in the former Soviet Union, Mogilner was a student in 1989 when documents of the country's history were opened in the final phases of the Cold War. The UIC professor has since dedicated her career to helping people rethink imperial history and how it should be written.

"I'm the last Soviet generation, and for my generation, history seemed to be the most exciting thing in the world," she said. "Suddenly, you get this opportunity to correct what you believed was wrong with your country and to open this black box of information that had been hidden."

Her research focuses on how political systems in Eurasia have changed over time. This is especially important today, as conflicts continue around the world, she said. Mogilnger is the Edward and Marianna Thaden Chair in Russian and East European History in the Department of History in UIC's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and is the 2026 Distinguished Scholar in Humanities, Arts, Design and Architecture. She has written books and articles that help students and scholars think differently about the history of empires.

Mogilner is also a founding editor of Ab Imperio, a respected international journal published quarterly. The journal focuses on new ways of studying empire, nationalism and national identity. Her work decenters "Russia" from the Russian and Soviet imperial pasts. In short, she studies the region's history by examining original documents that reflect multiple voices and experiences and expose the diversity, hybridity and complexity of imperial formations.

"We used to say that it's fun to live through the interesting times. It's not," she said. "It's actually very hard to live through the major cataclysms and transitions. But it's more rewarding to study them retrospectively and to understand those major changes from multiple perspectives."

Mogilner said she enjoys working with graduate students, some of whom write, study and perform research in up to six non-English languages each.

"My grad students, I have the most respect for them," she said. "It is probably the most rewarding part of what we do."

The war in Ukraine has limited Mogilner's research, making it difficult to access original documents on the continent. Mogilner grew up in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union. She said her research is her "therapy" when she's searching for a reason for optimism.

"This is the space that you control," Mogilner said. "You can accomplish something, you can sit, and you can write an article. You can say something that is meaningful and important, and we are immensely privileged to be able to do what we love. To me, research is a huge part of how I define what makes me satisfied with life and optimistic."