Read my article from Modern Intellectual History
Read my article from The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review
Patrick Michelson
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of History
Contact
plmichel@indiana.edu
Sycamore Hall 333
Education
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 2007
Research Interests
- Russian Orthodox thought
- Modern Christian thought
- European intellectual history
Professional Biography
I am an intellectual historian of Russian Orthodox thought and, more broadly, modern Christian thought on the European Continent. My principal work explores the many intersections among Russian Orthodox theology, the discursive and ideological traditions of Russia’s educated society, church-state relations in a multi-confessional empire, and the creation of normative categories during the Church’s Synodal period (1721–1917). My initial research in this field of study concentrated on the development of religious liberty as a discourse among liberation movements in Russia’s late imperial period (1825–1905). My current book project concentrates on the ascetic revolution in Russian Orthodox thought (1843–1917) as a response to Russia’s own monastic revival in the nineteenth century, the challenges of intelligentsia radicalism to religious consciousness, advancements in the social and theological sciences, and the psychological and cultural demands of modernity.
In an historiographical sense, my research seeks to complicate many of the familiar narratives that inform our understanding of Russian Orthodox thinkers and institutions, including the very notion of Orthodox as a stable category of analysis, and bring the study of Russian Orthodox thought into conversation with the study of modern Russian history and culture. Grounded in the methods of contextual analysis, my work challenges the standard approaches to the study of Russian Orthodox thought, most of which are determined by a variety of theological, confessional, even ideological agendas that elide contingency, paradox, and historicity. These interests in historiography, method, and history are reflected in the courses I teach at Indiana University, which range from the history of Religious Studies as a discipline to the history of Russian Orthodox thought in an age of empire and revolution.
Awards
- Honorary Associate Fellow, Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia, University of Wisconsin (2008-2011).
- Associate Lecturer, University of Wisconsin (2007-2008).
Courses Recently Taught
- REL A202 Can Christ Be Saved? Dilemmas of the Modern Jesus
- REL A355 True Belief: A History of Orthodox Christianity
- REL A450 Religious Enlightenment and Its Discontents
- REL R133 Introduction to Religion
- REL R300 Russian Orthodoxy in and Age of Empire and Revolution
- REL R389 Making Religion Modern
Publication Highlights
Co-editor with Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014).
Peer-review article: “Slavophile Religious Thought and the Dilemma of Russian Modernity, 1830–1860,” Modern Intellectual History 7:2 (2010), 239-67.
Review article: Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), for The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 38 (2011), 65-74.
Translation: 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: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 27-51.