Context brings the brightest minds to your living room with perspective-shifting online lectures.

Vanished Kingdoms of Eastern Europe: Exploring East Prussia with Dr. Asya Pereltsvaig

Vanished Kingdoms of Eastern Europe: Exploring East Prussia with Dr. Asya Pereltsvaig


No events are scheduled at this time. Want to be notified when it’s back? Click the blue button to the right and we’ll notify you.

Can't make this time? A video recording will be sent to all participants after the seminar.

Do you ever wonder about the European landscape before major, modern nation-states such as France, Spain, Germany, and Russia dominated the map?

Join us as we learn more about several states which have since vanished into the mists of history. The five nations we discover will provide the necessary background for studying Eastern European history. Our curriculum has been designed to be enjoyed as individual seminars or as a series of live-taught, interactive conversations.

During our fifth conversation, we will time-travel into East Prussia, the home of not one but three vanished civilizations. First, East Prussia was the homeland of a Baltic people who spoke a language closely related to the surviving Latvian and Lithuanian. In the 13th century, this area was taken over by the Teutonic knights and turned into a monastic state and later a fief of Poland. In the late 1700s, it became a province of the Kingdom of Prussia. 

The province’s capital city of Königsberg was the birthplace of the philosopher Immanuel Kant and more generally an important intellectual center of Eastern Europe. Yet, the German chapter in East Prussia’s history came to an end as a result of the Soviet occupation in 1945. The Soviets erased all memory of the area’s German past, renaming Königsberg after one of the Soviet leaders and the town of Tilsit, where Napoleon and the Russian Emperor Alexander signed a peace treaty, into Sovietsk. After the collapse of the USSR, this region remains an exclave of Russia and a sort of time-capsule of the Soviet period. 

Led by an expert on linguistics and history Asya Pereltsvaig, Ph.D., this Conversation will explore the history of East Prussia. Designed to inform curiosity as well as future travels, participants will come away with an increased understanding of this fascinating region, as well as a desire to explore it first-hand. 

Asya Pereltsvaig received a PhD in Linguistics from McGill University and has taught at Yale, Cornell and Stanford, as well as in several U.S. and European universities. Her expertise is in language and history, and the relationship between them. Her most recent books, Languages of the World: An Introduction, 3rd edition (2020) and The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (2015) were published by Cambridge University Press.

This conversation is suitable for all ages.

90 minutes, including a 30 minute Q&A.

Customer Reviews

Based on 2 reviews
100%
(2)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
K
K.K. (Bloomfield Hills, US)
Excellent presentation

This was a well-organized, very interesting presentation. The maps were excellent. The pacing was just right. Dr.Pereltsvaig was very open to answering questions and repeating information if needed. I am eager to take more classes from her.

P
P.R. (Québec, CA)
History is so surprising

Discover a thousand years of Baltic and Germanic history being now officially Russian history!

Customer Reviews

Based on 2 reviews
100%
(2)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
0%
(0)
K
K.K. (Bloomfield Hills, US)
Excellent presentation

This was a well-organized, very interesting presentation. The maps were excellent. The pacing was just right. Dr.Pereltsvaig was very open to answering questions and repeating information if needed. I am eager to take more classes from her.

P
P.R. (Québec, CA)
History is so surprising

Discover a thousand years of Baltic and Germanic history being now officially Russian history!