When her classmates were worried about their paths after graduation, Erika Monahan intentionally decided to remain focused on the present. Despite her training and innate skills as an historian, she has been able to keep this orientation front and center as she's navigated career choices in a variety of geographies. Find out how, while clues from the past can certainly inform the future, the present provides a necessary grounding.
A chance trip to the Soviet Union just before the fall had a huge impact on Erika Monahan and she entered college knowing that she wanted to learn the Russian language and travel back there. Configuring her studies around travel, she became a history major and decided to focus on the present and let the future stay out there until she was ready for it. A web of connections allowed her to revisit after college some of the places she’d gone previously. But her own desire to go deeper into the history and a little adventure put her on a path to navigate other geographies for her career and family. In this episode, find out from Erika how, while clues from the past can certainly inform the future, the present provides a necessary grounding…on Roads Taken Revisited with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Erika Monahan is currently an associate professor in the department of history at the University of New Mexico, where she has been since 2008. Her research and teaching focus on the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Russia from the ninth century to the present, with special emphasis on the history of the Russian empire, environmental history, commerce in this part of the world, and Russia in a larger European and global context. Her writing and scholarship have won numerous awards and she recently served as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow in Cologne, Germany.
Erika Monahan: Everyone around me is talking about this thing corporate recruiting, but I sensed immediately that it was taking up a lot of people's time. But I had this sense that time was precious and that people were just sinking their whole year into worrying about the future. And I was a little bit like the future is going to come no matter what. And so I'm just going to focus on being present.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: When her classmates were worried about their paths after graduation, Erika Monahan intentionally decided to remain focused on the present. Despite her training and innate skills as a historian, she's been able to keep this orientation front and center as she's navigated career choices in a variety of geographies. Find out how, while clues from the past can certainly inform the future, the present provides the necessary grounding. On today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Erika Monahan who, as a daughter of Dartmouth, has had an interesting experience going in and out and being home and not being home and around the girdled earth and all of that. And we are so delighted that you're here with us. So thanks so much for being here, Erika.
EM: Thank you for having me. It's really an honor and it's a wonderful project that you're doing. I've enjoyed listening to some of my classmates podcasts and look forward to listening to all of them.
LJR: Nice. Nice. Well, since you have listened, you know that when I visit someone for the first time, I ask them two questions and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
EM: Gosh. Because I confess to listening to the podcast, I can't even pretend I'm being surprised by this question. But for the first one, I don't have a very good answer. I mean. Who was I when I was in college? I was, you know, still the kind of big fish in a small pond, well rounded, overachiever that was super psyched to come to a place like Dartmouth and recognize that I had so much privilege and opportunity. And you know, I think I wasn't alone in easing into or like trying to deny this slow dawning recognition that you are no longer a big fish in your high school pond and that you're around, you know, surrounded by all these people that whose accomplishments have already exceeded yours, but also a bunch of psyched and neat people. And so I mean, that's like who I was maybe inside my own head. In terms of activities, I had done gymnastics and I had decided I wanted to Try and put academics over gymnastics. And, you know, for lots of reasons, I, Dartmouth, I'm from New Hampshire. Dartmouth was just down the road. It'd been a dream for a long time.
And I transitioned to diving. So I was learning how to dive, which has, you know, there's a lot of transferable skills, flipping and spinning big differences. You go in on your head, not your feet. So that was harder than you would think to adjust to, but I was being a diver and I liked going outside. So I went to, you know, I was kind of on the edges of being involved in cabin and trail and yeah, that, that was sort of me in college and well, no, I guess. This has informed who I've been, is I had never, well, I'd been on two plane rides in my whole life. One, my grandfather worked for Parks and Rec of New Hampshire, and one time up in Franconia Notch, I'm from Littleton, right next to Franconia Notch, where the old man on the mountain used to be, and one time he take, we were at the airstrip in Franconia, and some person was flying a small plane around Franconia Notch, and my grandpa was like, get in. And I got to go on this ride around Franconia Notch. It was amazing. So, that was, I'd been on a flight, like, at some point when I was a little kid. And then when I was in seventh grade, I was in the band and I played the flute. Yep. That well rounded Dartmouth, you know, vibe. And my, the band got to play in Disney World. So these, this was like as much as I'd been on a plane until my junior year, when I got to go on a people-to-people exchange to the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1991, I get to spend a month going to Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and returned three weeks before the coup in August, 1991, that brought down the Soviet Union.
And so I got to Dartmouth and two things, one, I was like, wow, that place, the Russia was the Russian empire and Ukraine and Kazakhstan were super interesting. And I didn't understand a word anyone said. Let me take Russian language. And number two. I was like, wow, that was amazing. I'd love to go on more trips.
And so I pretty much structured my Dartmouth education around doing FSPs. So I went on the FSP to Kenya and I went on the FSP to St. Petersburg in Russia. It meant by the, between like doing the prerequisites for those and going away two quarters, it meant that I kind of needed a non-sequenced major, because just to fit it all in in your classes and stuff. And history was a non-sequenced major, became a history major. That was just fine; I liked stories and but lo and behold, I've turned out to be a historian. Whereas when I came in, you know, I probably thought I was going to take a lot of government classes and get involved in, you know, public politics or something like that.
At one stint, I'd been class president. And I actually, this was a joke because then I'm going to…you know Brendan Doherty. Brendan Doherty and I went to the same high school and he was vice president in the year I was co class president. So I always took a little pride in that because he was our Dartmouth class president. You know, I love Brendan Doherty. Super glad to, you know, have known him most of my life now. But yeah, I never went that route at all, even though I had totally intended to. And instead, I went this history and kind of traveled the gold girded earth route for real. Although there's more countries I haven't been to than I have been to.
LJR: Well, you've been to a lot, but you were like…so I love that that one experience kind of set you on a path. You didn't know exactly what the path was, even what the end was, but you knew, I want to be traveling. I want to be doing this. I want to be experiencing and understanding more about what I'm seeing and who I'm interacting with.
EM: So I want to point out that there's a real downside to that, like, because the first place I went was Siberia and I or I did my dissertation research in Siberia. I read. Archives in Russia for two years about Siberian trade in the 17th century, which I'm not even making this up. And then the first time once I went to Spain in the Alhambra, and I was like, it was like a warm, sunny day on the Mediterranean, like flowers are fragrant, the food is beautiful, the men are handsome. And, I mean, And I was like, oh my gosh, if only that plane ride had been to Spain instead of, instead of Russia. I mean, the history is fascinating. The, you know, you've got Islamic history and Christian history and all this architecture and everything. It's all there. With better weather, better food, and better, you know, weather. And so, but yeah, it was too late for me. I got, I got hooked on the, the Russo Pass.
LJR: There are some good things about that too. So you were hooked. So does that mean that right after school, undergrad, you went directly into grad school?
EM: No, not at all. And I actually have a better answer for this question. When you said, when you were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become? I consciously, so I can, kind of proud of myself for this, had no idea. And one of the reasons I had no idea was because my work study job was in the reserve corridor. And I pretty quickly figured out that Thursday nights when everyone is watching Friends, I, like, I could just sit there and do my own homework and get paid and so I don't know what Friends is all about. But I worked in the reserve quarter and like me and this one other person who became some super successful hedge fund manager would be there Thursday nights shutting the place down. So he would always come all those years. And then he graduated and he came back my junior year and it was clear to me, everyone around me is talking about this thing, corporate recruiting. And I didn't really know what that was. I’d come from pretty uneducated people and stuff. I didn't just had no clue what all that meant, but I sensed immediately that it was taking up a lot of people's time. And some people were like, this is like a new job, this is like my job, it's taking up everything. And I already had this, I mean I do have this, I'm bad with time and getting worse, but I had this sense that time was precious and that people were just sinking their whole year into worrying about the future and I was a little bit like the future is going to come no matter what. And so I'm just going to focus on being present. And I was helped by one day this kid kind of came back to the library corridor when he was there as a corporate recruiter the next year for whatever big hedge fund or corporate bank he worked for. And he was like, look, you know, you got me those books all these years. I can get you shortlisted for an interview. Just. I was like, what's a CV? And he was like, he was like, yeah, just, just look at, like, get it together and give me something and you'll get an interview. And I was a little bit like, whoa. And then he also told me he was, he was like, I was like, well, how's it like what you're doing? He's like, well, I was hospitalized for having this minor heart attack as a some, as like a 20 something year old because I was just working 90 hour weeks. And that made me be a little bit like, I think I'll pass. He's like, it's just part of the territory. And my dad always told me you could sleep when you’re dead. And so I was a little bit like, for whatever reason, I'll like, I think I'll pass. Pretty much I was like, you know what, I'm just going to worry about the future when the future comes. And this year I'm going to focus on doing my history thesis.
I was interested in thinking about how attitudes towards nature and the environment, because, you know, I care about the environment and I'd already done written this little paper about global warming and so I was like, what did people think about the environment in the past? And so I really just kind of jumped into that project spent the whole year on it the night before the like thesis is due. I actually lived in a house with someone who won the thesis prize for that year and I think he like went to bed early and went out to dinner with his girlfriend, now wife while I was like sitting in my computer being like, I wonder how I should end this and like watching the sunrise like in the hours before the history thesis is due. And I remember being like, wow, well, there's there was a challenge like unmet in terms of time management and what a junk show. I just, but it was really fun and I was really interested in it. So in the back of my mind, I was a little bit like, maybe I should have a go at it again. Like maybe I should try and get a PhD in history and just make sure that I can, you know, go to bed early the night before it's time. To prove to myself that I've mastered time management. Well, I did get a PhD in history, but it came much later. But no chance I was like, I watched the sunrise that morning too, and was a little bit like, how should I end this? But in between that, I actually, I went to Russia and I had this job in the nineties. I was part of the shock troops of capitalism in the wild nineties in Russia, which is a whole other story. Before I decided Oh my goodness, I've had enough of Russian business. But I'm still interested in things Russian, so let me see if I can get into graduate school and maybe go and…
LJR: That is very cool. So, and it kind of surprises me that you were on the capitalism bandwagon after hearing about the heart, Mr. Heart Attack, but I see how it kind of
EM: It was kind of curiosity that got me there, right? But as we look back and look what's happened to Russia, I mean, well now it's a fascistic state. Before that, it was, we were calling it a “managed market economy.” But in the 90s, I mean, I say that with retrospect. I wasn't like, here I am to build capitalism as a Western person of the 90s. Although I was, I was working for a Ukrainian company based in Moscow. And that was kind of the idea, and we were serving all these, you know, the people that were producing fast moving consumer goods, like Procter & Gamble, that were bringing deodorant and nice soaps to Russia. Like, when I went to the Soviet Union, the abiding impression was this place smells like BO and urine and then by the 90s that already wasn't the case because you know, all these Western products were getting sold and all these consultants were coming in and out and I was working for a transport company that was sending them in and out. And I and actually I'll even share this one Incident that looms so large in my life. In August, 1998, Russia defaulted on its foreign debt as part of the global financial crisis. But it hit Russia super hard. Many of the other expats working there at the time decided that was the time to go to business school, but I was working for a transport company that was actually just having all this business moving people out. So I could, I stuck around, I still had a job. And I remember taking a cab one night with a cab driver. He's gesturing over the wheel, like leaning forward, gesturing at all these neon signs of businesses and fancy hotels. And he was like, see all this, see all this, it's going to be gone. It's going to be gone. And I was like, where's it going to go? And he's like, They're going to take it back over. And I was like, who's they? He's like, the KGB. And I was like, silly tax drivers. They don't understand that there is no turning back the waves of capitalist development and democracy go hand in hand. These ignorant cab drivers, thank goodness they're not running things. You know, and yeah, so this was 1998 and I mean, I wish I'd gotten his name and could go back and just talk a little bit more with him about his perspective at the time. Because that's what's happened. Here we are and talking in 2024.
LJR: And if he had been running things, he probably wouldn't have let that happen.
EM: Yeah. I think you're right about that. Yeah. Yeah.
LJR: But, but Erica, this feels like a far cry from 16th century Siberia. [EM: Yeah.] And so talk to me about. How one goes from a historian of not the recent past, but a longer past, and then what one does with that, how you integrate being there, not being there, all of those things.
EM: Well, you're absolutely right. Here I was doing a Dartmouth thesis about medieval attitudes towards nature, and Walter Simons was my medievalist advisor who's just recently retired. He was fantastic. And so I really, I was just fascinated by that very old, old, a long time ago, sense of things and environmental things.
And then I went to Russia and I found I was fascinated by that and Russian language. I mean, I was really, it was fun for me to be able to learn a language and struggle with getting better and better at it. So when I decided that after…I worked, I, well, I actually did two things. I mean, I left college. No, I haven't talked about this. I went on the Environmental Studies FSP and I, to Kenya, and I was so fascinated by that place, I wanted to go back. So pretty much, I decided I'm going to focus on my senior year, I'm going to wait tables until I have enough money for a plane ticket, and then I'm going to go back and I'm going to volunteer on the same conservation project that I volunteered on south of Nairobi in the FSP. And the same people that had run the field course for Dartmouth, they took me on as a volunteer for this ecotourism habitat conservation project that they were starting. So I was going to do that, but that was going to be volunteer, and I had all these student loans that were going to come in, and I needed to figure out how I was going to pay for them. And so, this is actually really funny. Gosh, I feel like I'm going on so long and I haven't thought about this stuff in years. But, talk about, like, networking, like, hinterland networking. So my mom was a secretary for Garnet Hill in Franconia Notch, and she was like, she would like talk to people on the phone that she talked to on a regular basis. And it turned out that the guy that was had the insurance company that did Garnet Hills, OSHA, like worker safety stuff, was a Dartmouth grad that loved Dartmouth so much that he moved to Dartmouth, raised his family there, and set up a company in Dartmouth. And so his daughter married a Dartmouth émigré named Peter Vins. And Peter Vins was Ukrainian, whose father was a Baptist minister. Like in a world where there's more, you know, Union, Greek Catholic, Orthodox, he was, they were Baptists. And his dad was a Baptist minister who had protested in favor of human rights against the Soviet regime and been imprisoned for it. And Peter had been imprisoned for it, too. And it turned out that there was a little Baptist lobby in America that knew about Grigori Vins because he'd written a pamphlet for human rights. And they lobbied for his release. And so in 1980, this guy, Grigori Vins, with his grandson and mother and some of the other members of the family were traded in a super low level spy trade. And they ended up in Vermont near Solzhenitsyn. And Peter, the son, got his GED, and then he went to Dartmouth, where he met this woman that was the daughter of a Dartmouth graduate, who talked to my mom on the phone. And so, and she told him, like, my daughter's at Dartmouth studying, studying Russian language. And that guy came, and he bought me lunch, which, I was like super, at like Pete's Tavern down there on Main Street? And he was like, and he was like, do you ever think about going to Russia? Again? Working for a company there? And I was a little bit like, Oh, I'm just being present right now and studying history my senior year. I'm not thinking about the future yet, but thanks, very nice. And then, but like, I had like two conversations with him and then he called me. When I was like home visiting my family from volunteering and he was like, what are you gonna do now? And I was like, oh, yeah, I got some student loans I gotta pay and he's like you should go to Russia. And I was like, well, okay, and so that's how I ended up in Russia. And so then you know working for three and a half years for this startup business company while like all our friends here are in the first wave of Internet those starts up, I'm in like a startup that's trying to move objects from A to B, which was way harder than it should have been, and like dealing with Russian customs to get things over borders. So the irony that I spent two years reading 17th-century customs books for my dissertation just really kills me. Like if you had been, that's how it's going to turn out, I would have been like, not no, I would have been like, hell no, like, no way.
But anyway, so then I'm like, okay, I had another, enough of Russian business. I always thought it might be neat to try and be a professor. Maybe I could go to graduate school and study something Russian. And somehow, I just, with sources or whatnot, moved forward in time. I mean, my first, the first thing that ever interested me about Russia was the Russian Revolution in 1917. I mean, I remember, so distinctly walking across Red Square in 1991 thinking, like, how did this revolution happen? I mean, I'm coming into a land where it is drab. There is nothing on the store but, like, fermented hard boiled pickles on, like, a bottom shelf. And, and this was our Cold War enemy. And, you know, being a consumerist American, that's, like, what I see first. And I was, like, there's no contest here. And so I, how did, how did a society choose this? Well…it's not…and so I was interested in the Russian revolution, but then quickly studying that was like, well, what came before? Well, it came before. And I, so I kind of ended up in the 16th, 17th century.
LJR: But you didn't stay there.
EM: Well, no, no, no. Kind of, I'm kind of, well, 16th to 18th century. I'm, I mean, [LJR: OK.] I teach now from, The ninth to the present, so because now if, you know, if once upon a time in the Cold War, if so many institutions had multiple Russian history professors or of the Russian Empire, or I mean, now in this moment, it's really shown us like we never appreciated, but insufficiently appreciated how important it is to decolonize and stop centering Russia as the end all be all. I could, don't get me started on that. If there used to be lots of Russian history professors at any one given institution, that has pretty much gone away. So I teach from the beginning to the end and I like that.
LJR: Yeah. And I mean, It seems also in service of these questions of like, if we start here, wherever the given here is, we have to know where we were and what the choices were and the consequences of the choices and then the backlash to the consequence to the choice and all of those things. So it is, it does seem like you have to know all of it. But okay, so that doesn't mean that your own geography was fated. So how did you, of course, you figure out where we're going to grad school, what's the progression of where you physically land step by step to where you are right now, which is not where you usually are?
EM: Oh yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, this is I guess since we're all like reminiscing from like where we were from college. Let me come clean. So I was, you know, in Kenya for like six months after, you know, I didn't have a very long stint there. And then I moved to Russia.
LJR: Oh, so you did do that?
EM: Oh yeah. Yep. So I went, I went to Kenya and I volunteered on this habitat conservation area, which was an amazing experience. And I was super glad in 2022, to go back with my family and visit the Raineys that had been our host and visit again, the family, Paco Lasurago was the man that taught me and so many other Dartmouth students Swahili when we were there and, you know, kind of see their family and how they've progressed and how life in Kenya is going for them. So that was amazing.
Then I went to Russia, and I was, you know, kind of, as one expat rag at the time called it, like a fat-ankled American girl who just couldn't compete against Russian beauties everywhere, and I had this job that I'm working, you know, 14 hour days, and the bread and vodka diet wasn't so good for me at any rate, so I didn't get a boyfriend in Russia. Then I went to graduate school and I'm in the Bay Area and where I was comforted by people that would say the men are emotionally unavailable here. And but then I happened to yeah, this, Oh gosh, this is kind of crazy. I had this bridge jumping accident. I'm not my best judgment, poor judgment. I jumped off this bridge with a rope that was too big and I hurt myself and I needed to be med-evaced out of the country. And I basically was med-evaced out of the country where I had the chance to meet a very nice boy from Alaska who is now my husband, to make a long story short. So what they say, you know, Alaska, the odds are good, but the goods are odd. There's just so many more men than women in Alaska, that it turns out—this is my advice for everyone—if you're having a hard time getting a good boyfriend, just go to Alaska. There's a lot of, you know, fine, single men there. So yeah, that's what worked for me. I just had to, as one engineering student, I just needed to, you know, reconfigure my search. It happened kind of accidentally, but that's how it happened for me. So then I had so I have this husband from Alaska who got assigned for a couple of years to be in Germany on a temporary stint. But then since I am a professor at the University of New Mexico, it was during COVID, he got reassigned pretty quickly and I had, we had to choose. I mean, we already lived two time zones apart. Like, yeah, we have one of those marriages with kids, which two time zones is hard enough. And I just thought 10 time zones where an international borders are being closed. We're going to stay together. I was scheduled to teach online anyway, and so I, we came as a family to be in Germany. But then I, since it was long enough, I needed to figure out something, and so I heard about this the Alexander von Humboldt, kind of, what a Dartmouth spirit. It was this German explorer who went around the world, and now the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation funds foreign scholars to come do their research in Germany. And so I went through the application process and was lucky enough to get funded to be a fellow. So I like officially have a gig here as well, even if it was that family reason that got me here first. But we will have been here three years and we will go back to the U. S. this summer.
LJR: Wow. Okay, but I lost sense of time for a second. So when and where was the bridge accident?
EM: Oh, the bridge accident was in 2004. Yeah. This is when I was in graduate school. Yeah. It in some ways, gosh, it just, so much of my life has been informed by Russia and so much of the two and a half years we've been here so far has been totally informed and shaped by the war that's going on in Ukraine now. After the February 24th invasion, the war, it had been going on. There'd already been a war in Donbass since the annexation of Crimea. And when Russia, you know, sent military people into Donbass to instigate the separatist movement there in a sort of astroturf move. But after the February 24th invasion, we had a Ukrainian family that had stayed and lived with us. And it's great now they live in an apartment right downstairs from us. So we see them every day. They have three kids and there's quite a Ukrainian community here that is, you know, doing the best it can to readjust. Some people have, you know, everyone has family back in Ukraine. And then in the meantime, I have a number of Russian friends who, who are still in Russia. And their views are, span a spectrum, which is somehow hard to take, both out of, you know, worry and sympathy for them, and also out of horror at the work that poisonous propaganda has done. And I have a number of Russian friends that have left, and are in various parts of the world trying to sort things out. And this one, go figure, this one Russian, who I happened to go with to jump off the bridge, has left Russia right away, like two nights after. He pretty much took his base jumping gear. He's camped out in Arco, Italy, which is a place where this is, I don't know if you know what base jumping is. Never ever let your children do it. Please never ever do it. It's not, it is not a sustainable hobby, although knock on wood, he's been luckily doing it for years and he moved to this place in Italy where he can jump off big rocks with a suit.
LJR: Okay, so you come back from, in this emergency situation from Russia, you meet your, who would become your husband. But you're still in, that was during graduate school. So did you choose your next adventure and geography based on your husband at that point?
EM: Yes. Yes, but kind of I would split my time between California and I would kind of go back and forth to be with him in Alaska a bit or come down to California to, you know, be a teaching assistant or use the library as I needed it. And then I finished in my dissertation in 2007 and filed then, and then I, after staying up all night trying to figure out how to end it. Then I, you know, applied for jobs and I was an adjunct instructor for one semester up at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. And then I got this job at the University of New Mexico. And then we've had this kind of life with one foot in each state, Alaska and New Mexico, until we came to Germany. And all those years just like bore, you know, just like history teaching, kids. that gamut.
LJR: Yeah, yeah, and but didn't you get a little stint back at Dartmouth as well?
EM: I did, which was so much fun. Yeah, I was a visiting associate professor at Dartmouth for the whole 2018-2019 year and well, gosh, I'm supposed to keep it positive, right? Like in some ways it just, you know, Dartmouth is such a fantastic institution that has so many opportunities. It, like, hurts my heart to think about the disparities in higher education today being a professor at you know, New Mexico competes with Mississippi, I think, is one of the poorest states in the union and so many things flow from that. So, yeah, it was a fantastic opportunity.
LJR: Well, okay. And so you're doing this. I can't call it bi-coastal
EM: By, yeah, no, b-state. No, bi-time zone. Yeah. Yeah.
LJR: This bifurcated living arrangement, which seems to have its own challenges, but also works for you and that, you know, we make things work and then you get to be all together in Germany. I know you are all about being present and the future will come when the future, but the future is right around the corner for you. And you know that there's going to be this little end to the fellowship in Germany. So can you imagine what that future might hold?
EM: Oh, well, sure. Yeah. I'm going to teach at, you know, I just had to submit my book order for my classes in the fall at UNM. I'm going to teach a seminar about the war that's going on right now, that kind of thing, digs into the history that Putin is claiming. I mean, so much of history has long and will continue to be mobilized for political purposes, but it's really striking the extent to which Putin is drawing on history for the justifications that he's giving for this brutal and genocidal aggression against Ukraine. And so we're going to dig into that right down to it's a German, a cleric who actually wrote the first text in 1674 that suggested that Russians and Ukrainians were one people anyway. And even in the 18th century, Catherine the Great was grappling with what to do about Ukrainian autonomy and how to try and exert control over this place that Russia had formally acquired in 1685 without courting too much rebellion. So, so we're gonna talk about the history a lot.
LJR: Yeah. And that is, it's so telling that when I was saying, well, 1600 is a far cry from today, but it's not, right? You're, you're seeing that there are these, ways that for good or bad, there are these stories have been tied together. And you seem to be the perfect person to be able to talk about those things. And I'm so glad that your students will have that opportunity.
EM: Thanks. Yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad for the opportunity. I'm really looking forward to being back in the classroom and getting to show that, too. I mean, even the research I'm doing now is I'm writing a book about these very, very old maps of the Russian Empire, and one of the things that has become clear to me by reading these very old maps, even produced by the Russian state in the 17th century, was that their territorial reach wasn't nearly as solid as documents in Moscow said they were. And it just seems to me that if Putin had even been exposed to this kind of history or whatever, he's had plenty of opportunities to be exposed to better history than he's drawn on for his justifications in this war and it hasn't moved him. So yeah, I don't know what good it does, but that's what I'll do, I'll be doing in the classroom this fall and looking forward to it.
LJR: Excellent. Well, Erika, I really appreciate kind of your talking us through and giving us the sweet reminder to be present and you never know kind of where that's going to take you. And it seems to fall into place without having to worry so much about the future, but I'm glad that you're there kind of analyzing the past and analyzing the present. And so thank you for sharing all this.
EM: Oh, Leslie, thank you so much for, you know, doing this. Like I said, it's really a great project that you've done and it's. It's actually really fun to think about this stuff and kind of revisit our earlier selves. And yeah, thanks for drawing that lesson out of it. Yeah, being present has some good benefits. So much of the suffering that we create, we create it for ourselves in our own minds. And if that's true, then we can escape our own sufferings, right?
LJR: That was Erika Monaghan, who's an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of New Mexico, where she has been since 2008. Her research and teaching focus on the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Russia from the 9th century to the present, with special emphasis on the history of the Russian Empire, environmental history, commerce in this part of the world, and Russia in a larger European and global context. Her writing and scholarship have won numerous awards, and she recently served as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Cologne, Germany.
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