About
Pavel Iushin is a first-year PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. He specializes in modern intellectual history and the history of science, with a focus on the sciences of the mind in the long nineteenth century, primarily in Western and Central Europe. His current dissertation project seeks to provide a new account of the history of associationist psychology and its influence on Western science and scholarship from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, or roughly from Hume to Husserl.
Before coming to Michigan, Pavel received his bachelor’s degree in Philology from the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and his master’s degree in Comparative History from Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, Austria. His work there centered on the oeuvre of the Russian polymath Pavel Florensky. His MA thesis, “How Science Went Bankrupt: Pavel Florensky and the Crisis of Scientific Rationality in Fin-de-Siècle Europe,” which examined the late nineteenth-century “bankruptcy of science” debate through Florensky’s intellectual biography, won the Peter Hanák Prize for the best thesis from the Department of Historical Studies at CEU.
Since 2018, Pavel has also been part of a research group on the cultural history of astronomy and the reception of the Copernican system during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the late Russian Empire and modernist literary culture, in collaboration with Ilona Svetlikova (University of Tübingen), Barbara Kukushkina (Harvard University), and Masha Fesenko (Princeton University).
Photo: Nika Vodvud.
