Meet the Faculty

Patrick Michelson

• Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

• Ph.D. (History) at University of Wisconsin (2007)

Contact Information

Background

• Honorary Associate Fellow, Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, University of Wisconsin (2008-2011).
• Associate Lecturer, University of Wisconsin (2007-2008).

I am a historian of modern Russia, with a special focus on Russian Orthodox thought. My current research project focuses on a group of reformist theologians at the Moscow Spiritual Academy, the premier institution of higher education in the Russian Church, who in the last decades of the old regime (1891-1917) sought to reconfigure the doctrines of their faith in accordance with the scholarly demands of contemporary science and the discursive contours of educated society. This study, which mainly relies on the methods of contextual analysis, allows me to investigate a variety of historical problems related to the issues of church and state, faith and reason, and religion and revolution.
In addition to this work, I am in the process of co-editing a volume (with Prof. Judith Kornblatt of the University of Wisconsin) on modern Russian Orthodox thought (1787-1927), which brings together a dozen scholars from several disciplines to examine the various ways in which Orthodoxy was expressed among the church elite during an extended period of cultural change and intellectual fermentation.

Beyond the study of Russian Orthodoxy, my teaching and research interests include Patristic and Byzantine Christianity, the religious Enlightenment, liberal Protestant humanism, Krisis theology, the history of religious ideas, and genres of western religious writing.

Research Interests

• Russian Orthodoxy
• History of Orthodox Christianity
• Modern Christian Thought
• Russian and European intellectual history

Courses Recently Taught

• Orthodox Christianity
• Introduction to Religion
• Interdisciplinary Study of Modern Russia
• Soviet History in Memoirs and Diaries
• History of Imperial Russia

Publication Highlights

“Illiberal Russia and the Varieties of Slavophilism,” a review article of Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (2009), for The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 38 (2011), 63-72.

“Slavophile Religious Thought and the Dilemma of Russian Modernity, 1830–1860,” Modern Intellectual History 7/2 (2010), 239-67.

Translation of Sergei Horujy, “The Origins of Russian Philosophical Humanism: The Dispute between Slavophiles and Westernizers,” in G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole, eds., The History of Russian Philosophy: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 2010).

Book Reviews for Canadian Slavonic Papers, Journal of Religious History, Slavonica