NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY RESEARCH INITIATIVE IN RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, AND RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

Vera Pozzi obtained her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Milan in 2015. Her dissertation received the “Sangalli Institute Award for the Religious History 2016” and has been published under the title “Kant and Russian Orthodoxy. Ecclesiastical Academies and Philosophy in Russia between the XVIII and XIX Century” (FUP, Firenze 2017). In this work, she questiones the entrenched idea according to which Russian Orthodoxy is univocally linked to a closed form of identity from both a religious and a cultural perspective and she offeres historical and textual evidences of the existence of a multivocal identity, one that did not prevent Russian Orthodoxy to confront with modernity and its most controversial moments.

During her university years she met the Russian poet and essayist Olga Sedakova and started reflecting about the role of world culture in late Soviet intellectual sphere. In 2014 she was invited to take part in the first international research project about Sedakova’s poetry and thoughts (The Poetry and Poetics of Olga Sedakova. Origins, Philosophies, Points of Contention, Moscow 2017 and Madison 2019).

In 2017-2018 she has carried out post-doctoral research at the School of Philosophy of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) in Moscow, Russia. She developed a research project about Orthodox liberal intellectuals (esp. Sergei Averintsev and Olga Sedakova) and their role in the public sphere in the early post-Soviet years. The first results of her research have been published in the article “Culture as paideia. Sergei Averintsev and Olga Sedakova: Mapping Out a Path for Contemporary Christian Humanism” (2019).

Between 2019 and 2021 she collaborated with the “Lelio and Lisli Basso Foundation” and “Confronti Magazine and Study Center” (Rome, Italy) on a research project about religious pluralism and migration in Italy, focusing her contribution on the relationship between culture and religion in the life of a set of Orthodox parishes in the Lombardy region.

In 2021 and until April 2022 she joined the international team of the ERC Starting Grant Project “Postsecular Conflicts” headed by Kristina Stoeckl at the Department of Sociology of the University of Innsbruck as postdoc researcher. In the POSEC team she was involved in the analysis of the polarization of religious conflicts in the US, in Russia, in Central, Eastern and Western Europe inside Christian groups (Evangelical, Orthodox and Catholic).

In her research, Russian Intellectual History intertwines with Religious studies and Sociology of Religion.