Philip Edward Mosely (1905-1972) is often remembered as the “the Cold War’s organization man.” The world’s leading Sovietologist, he played a central role in shaping what came to be known as Russian, Soviet, and East European studies. Yet, the praise for his administrative talents has entirely overshadowed his early scholarly contributions, his work on diplomatic history, and especially his analysis of ethnographic materials and photographs that he collected in the 1930s in the Balkans. Indeed, he emerges as an excellent anthropologist avant la lettre, having crisscrossed the region (Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania) after receiving his primary ethnographic training at the Bucharest School of Sociology, founded by Dimitrie Gusti. Based on a careful study of the extensive Philip E. Mosely Collection in the archives of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Mosely papers held in the Rare Books & Manuscript Library at Columbia University in New York, this project seeks to reconsider Mosely, not only as a political and academic actor, but as a historical prism through which broader processes of identity, ideological formation and generation can be understood. It also explores the specificities of biography, the traps of autobiography, and the challenges of the archive.
Maria Todorova is the Gutgsell Professor of History Emerita at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is widely regarded as one of the most distinguished experts in the field of Southeastern European history and Balkan studies. She is the author (in English) of Imagining the Balkans (Oxford University Press, 1997; 2009); Bones of Contention (Baker Books, 2009); Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern (Central European University Press, 2006); Scaling the Balkans: Essays on Eastern European Entanglements (BRILL ACADEMIC PUB, 2018); The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins: Imagining Utopia, 1870s–1920s (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Her latest book (in German) is Der Balkan: Mission Possible (Mandelbaum verlag eG, 2025).
IWM Rector Misha Glenny will introduce the lecture and moderate the subsequent discussion.
