Svetlana Bogoyavlenskaya
Svetlana Bogoyavlensky (2nd of January 1977, Jurmala, Latvian SSR) – Doctor of Philosophy, a researcher of History Seminar of the University of Mainz (Germany).
Svetlana Bogoyavlensky was born into a family of teachers-philologists. Her great-grandfather was the physician and professor Konstantin Bogoyavlensky.
She studied at Lielupe Secondary School (then School No. 6), the Pushkin Lyceum, and the “Experiment” Pedagogical Center. In 1995, she enrolled in the Faculty of History and Philosophy at the University of Latvia, graduating with a Master’s degree in 2002.
From 1997 to 2002, she had been working as a researcher and collections curator at the museum “Jews in Latvia” under the direction of Marģers Vestermanis.
From October 2002 to February 2008, she had been a doctoral student at the Department of Eastern European History at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her doctoral supervisor was Professor Erwin Oberländer, a foreign member of the Commission of Historians of Latvia and an honorary doctor of the University of Latvia. At the same time, she taught at the University of Mainz courses on the history of Latvia, the history of antisemitism in the Russian Empire, and the history of relations between the state and the Church in Russia before 1917. She also worked as a guide at the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt and as a translator at the Institute for Social and Pedagogical Research in Mainz. In 2008, she defended her doctoral dissertation (Dr. phil.) in Mainz on the topic “Education and the Status of the Jewish Community in the Courland Governorate and in Riga, 1795–1915.”
In 2012, the publishing house Ferdinand Schöningh (Paderborn) released her monograph Die jüdische Gesellschaft in Kurland und Riga 1795–1915, based on her dissertation. In 2014, in collaboration with Professor Jan Kusber, head of the Department of Eastern European History at the University of Mainz, she published a collection of articles by German and Latvian historians on issues of 20th-century Latvian history titled Tradition und Neuanfang. Forschungen zur Geschichte Lettlands an der Wende vom 20. zum 21. Jahrhundert.
She is currently a research associate at the History Seminar of the University of Mainz. She teaches the history of Latvia and Russia. Since October 2012, she has been working on a project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG): “The Russian in the Latvian Context: The Construction of Russian Identities in Latvia, 1914–1940.”
Dzintars Ērglis
