Liya Xie is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Princeton University. She sees herself as an intellectual and cultural historian of late imperial Russia with a sensitivity to transnational and global perspectives. She is particularly interested in the fin-de-siècle entanglements between Eastern and Western knowledge systems and how these cross-cultural exchanges shaped our understanding of “modernity.” These questions are explored in her interdisciplinary doctoral dissertation, titled “In the Shadows of Rationality: Epistemic Fringes and Multiple "Easts" in the Making of Russian Modernity, 1880s-1920s.” 

Using Russian, English, French, German, and Chinese primary sources from four countries, the project reconstructs how Eastern-inspired “pseudo-scientific” and marginalized knowledge constituted an integral part of the search for answers to the looming crisis of values in fin-de-siècle Russian society. By incorporating methodological insights from the history of knowledge, religious studies, and medical humanities, her work conceptualizes the multiple “Easts” not only as ideas and discourses but also as objects and practices, or embodied ideas.