Dr Julia Leikin - Teaching Fellow in Modern European History
Julia Leikin is a historian of Russia and Modern Europe, with an interest in the development and practice of international law, and legal culture more broadly. Currently, she is working on a monograph that analyses the practice of the law of nations in the Russian Empire’s maritime realms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Looking to the sea and along the Russian Empire’s maritime frontiers, the project recovers the forgotten maritime dimension of imperial Russian history and shows the centrality of the maritime realm to Russian international thought.
Her recent and forthcoming publications set the scene for understanding the “Russian Mediterranean” – an important frontier in the development of Russian international and maritime law. Together with Elena Smilianskaia, she is the editor and translator of Russian Faith, Honour & Courage Displayed in a Faithful Narrative of the Russian Expedition by Sea in the Years 1769 & 1770 by Rear-Admiral John Elphinston, which was published in Russian translation in 2020 and will soon be released in the original English.
She received a Ph.D. from University College London in December 2016. Before coming to Royal Holloway, Leikin was Assistant Professor of History at Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and a British Academic Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Exeter. Leikin has also held fellowships at the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), Institute of Historical Research (London), and LMU-Munich Center for Global History. Her research has been supported by the IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Fellowship, the Scouloudi Foundation, German Historical Institute in Moscow, and the Hakluyt Society.
