Martina Winkler

Martina Winkler graduated in history, law and comparative literature. She completed a dissertation on Czech history, and now focuses on Russian Imperial history. The initial work on her current project on cultures of ownership was done at Stanford, where she spent a year as a Humboldt-fellow at the Center for Russian Studies.

Project Summary

For Russian history, a presumed lack of private property has often been described as a vital reason for economic as well as political backwardness. Rather than following this traditional pattern, Winkler's book Perceptions of Property and Ownership Among the Russian Elite, 18th and 19th Centuries discusses property and ownership as culturally constructed perceptions in contexts of nationalism, politics, economics and gender, and analyses the radical changes of ownership perception in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.