Aleksandr Kamenskiy

Alexander Borisovich Kamensky is a Soviet and Russian historian, head of the School of Historical Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the Higher School of Economics. He graduated from the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute named after N. K. Krupskaya (1980). Candidate of Historical Sciences (1984), Doctor of Historical Sciences (1999), Professor (2000). A student of V. I. Buganov and A. L. Stanislavsky. He worked at the Central State Archive of Ancient Acts in the archival repository of the collections of local institutions (1978–1985). In 2006, based on documents on the history of the town of Bezhetsk, he wrote the book Everyday Life of Russian Townspeople. Since 1988, he has been teaching at the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow State Historical and Archival Institute). He was an associate professor in the Department of Source Studies and Auxiliary Historical Disciplines. He headed the Department of Russian History of the Ancient World and the Middle Ages at the Faculty of Archival Studies of the Historical and Archival Institute of RSUH (until 2010). He teaches the special course “Russia in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries (Controversial Problems of History)” and the graduate special course “Current Problems in the Study of the History of Russia in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.” Since 2010, he has been dean of the Faculty of History at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and heads the Department of Political History. He is a member of the Academic Council of RSUH, the Russian Society for the Study of the 18th Century, the Scientific Council of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, and the International Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia. He was a scholarly consultant for Leonid Parfenov’s television film The Russian Empire. His areas of research interest include the history of Russia from the late 17th to the first quarter of the 19th century; source studies; special historical disciplines (genealogy, biographical studies); urban life in 18th-century Russia; and methods of historical cognition.