Am Planetarium 7 | 07743 Jena
Phone: +49 (0) 3641 9 44070
Mail: alexa[dot]vonwinning[at]uni-tuebingen[dot]de
Alexa von Winning is a historian of Eastern Europe. After completing research in Moscow, Kazan’ and Urbana-Champaign, she received her PhD in history from Tuebingen University in 2018. Her first book, Intimate Empire. The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855–1917, was published with Oxford University Press in 2022. Since 2020, Alexa von Winning has been working as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Eastern European History at Tuebingen University. She teaches a variety of classes that cover the history of Eastern Europe from the 18. to the beginning of the 21. century.
At Imre Kertész Kolleg, Alexa von Winning works on her post-Doc project on recent Eastern European economic and social history. The project examines neoliberal discourses and practices that spread widely throughout the former socialist countries in the 1990s, tracing their origins and outcomes in a wider chronological perspective. The transformation into market democracies after 1989/1991 demanded fundamental reforms of political and economic institutions from the Eastern European countries – but not only that: Academic observers, international political and economic elites, as well as regional decision-makers were convinced that the population also needed adaptation and renewal. With the help of coachings, trainings, and self-help literature, managers and employees were to shed their socialist imprints and prepare themselves for the new capitalist world. They were called to transform themselves from supposedly passive “Soviet people” into self-confident, entrepreneurial participants of the market economy. Picking up these widespread imaginations of “adapting the people”, the project traces the practices and experiences of “becoming capitalist” in Russia and Belarus in late socialism and the first post-socialist decade. While both contemporary elites and the wider population understood “becoming capitalist” as a westernizing endeavor, it included Soviet experiences and imaginations.
Alexa von Winning, Intimate Empire. The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022).
Alexa von Winning und Klaus Gestwa, eds, Themenheft: Umkämpfte Geschichte zwischen imperialen Obsessionen und nationalen Traumata, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht vol. 75, no. 3/4, 2024.
Alexa von Winning und Klaus Gestwa, eds, Themenheft: Aufbruch ins Ungewisse. 30 Jahre nach dem Zerfall der Sowjetunion, Religion und Gesellschaft in Ost und West vol. 49, no. 12, 2021.
Alexa von Winning und Kirill Vach, eds, Pis’ma B.P. Mansurova iz putešestvija po Pravoslavnomu Vostoku, 1857 [Berichte aus dem orthodoxen Osten: Reisebriefe von B.P. Mansurov, 1857] (Moskau: 2014).
Alexa von Winning und Katharina Eisenbarth, Mehr als ChatGPT. KI-Tools und Geschichte in der Hochschullehre, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 76, no. 3/4 (2025). [forthcoming, in print]
Alexa von Winning und Klaus Gestwa, Umkämpfte Geschichte zwischen imperialen Obsessionen und nationalen Traumata, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 75, no. 3/4 (2024): 133–147.
Alexa von Winning, Schnittstellen: Familien, Biographien und Empires, BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 35, no. 1 (2022): 7–30. [published 02/24]
Alexa von Winning, Lasst die Schwäne tanzen! Russische Musik für und gegen Krieg, Lügen und Diktatur, Osteuropa 73 (2023): 189–211.
Alexa von Winning, Väter und Töchter. Frauen als imperiale Akteurinnen zwischen Religion und Familie im Russländischen Imperium, L’Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft Z.F.G. 34, no. 1 (2023): 97–112.
Alexa von Winning und Klaus Gestwa, Das verkorkste Debüt der Demokratie in Russland nach 1991, Religion und Gesellschaft in Ost und West 49, no. 12 (2021): 4–7.
Alexa von Winning, Vom Paria zum Heilsbringer. Die Rückkehr der Religion auf die öffentliche Bühne, Einsichten und Perspektiven 1 (2021): 44–57.
Please find more information on Alexa von Winning's website at the University of Tübingen.