Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Cultural and Intellectual
- Empires, Colonialisms and Indigeneity
- Russia
- Social
- State, Politics, and Law
Areas of Interest
Modern Russian and Soviet history; urban history; everyday life; poverty and inequality; political culture.
Biography
Felix Cowan specializes in the history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, with research interests in political culture, urban history, and everyday life. His first book, The Kopeck Press: Popular Journalism in Revolutionary Russia, 1908-1918, is forthcoming from University of Toronto Press. This monograph focuses on cheap newspapers published for poor readers and uses these sources to explore an emerging democratic political culture in the early twentieth century Russian Empire. Professor Cowan's other published work explores themes of civil society, gender identity, and lower-class politics and culture in the revolutionary era of Russian and Soviet history. He is in the early stages of a new project on the history of democratic ideas, experiments, and reforms in Russia.
Education
Awards
Publications
- "Lower-class Reading in Late Imperial Russia" ( : 2023)
- “Kopeck Journalism as a Social Profession: Upward Mobility, Service, and the Civil Society Spectrum in Late Imperial Russia” ( : 2022)
- “Hidden Lives: Uncovering Gender Non-conformity in the Russian Press, 1911–1914” ( : 2022)
- “The Democracy Versus Democracy: Representation and Politics in Odessa During the 1912 State Duma Election” ( : 2020)