Catherine DaviesI know there's a lot going on but I wanted to call attention to a very blatant case of academic bullying carried out recently against my sister Franziska Davies.
On 6 August, Franziska published a sober and fair-minded critique in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung of certain strands in the New Imperial History of the Russian Empire. In passing, she mentioned Ab Imperio, a prominent journal in the field. What she said was factually correct.
In response, the journal's publishers – Marina Mogilner, Ilya Gerasimov, Sergei Glebov and Alexander Semyonov – wrote a nasty and unhinged attack on her, also in the FAZ, claiming, among other things, that she was a not a serious scholar and that her thinking about nationalism was identical to that of Vladimir Putin. (I kid you not!)
It was a despicable attempt at silencing a precariously employed scholar, simply because she had dared to criticise the Russocentrism of her field.
Mark Rubin
Safia | صفية
Ayanna K Thomas