Victoria Frede (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Associate professor at the History Department of UC Berkeley. She studied at Cambridge University and the School of Slavonic Studies, University College London before receiving her doctorate from Berkeley in 2002. Research interests: Imperial Russia, late 18th and 19th centuries; Russian intellectual history, with comparisons between developments in Russia, Germany, France and Britain; history of anti-religious thought; history of emotions; history of friendship. Her first book appeared in 2011 with Wisconsin University Press: “Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia”. She is currently writing a history of friendship in Russia from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century.