Greg Melleuish, Konstantin Sheiko and Stephen Brown

Short Biography

Greg Melleuish teaches and researches in both History and Political Science with a particular interest in the history of political ideas and world history. His book Cultural Liberalism in Australia (Cambridge 1995) and his more recent The Power of Ideas (Australian Scholarly Publishing 2009) explore large segments of Australian intellectual history. His most important excursion into World History has been an essay on the Clash of Civilisations published in Arjomand & Tiryakian (Eds.) Rethinking Civilizational Analysis (Sage 2004). Current research focuses largely on issues related to democracy and secularisation. In 2008, he organised colloquium on Weird History at the University of Wollongong. Greg also occasionally publishes opinion pieces in the Australian. He holds an MA from the University of Sydney and a PhD from Macquarie University and before coming to the University of Wollongong held positions at the University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland.

Dr Konstantin Sheiko is an ethnic Russian born in Kazakhstan: he moved to Moscow with his family in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He studied Law and History at the Moscow Institute of Economics, Politics and Law before receiving a Masters in International Relations from the United States International University and a PhD in History from the University of Wollongong, Australia. His interests include post-Soviet Russian nationalism and Eurasian politics. He is the author of Nationalist Imaginings of the Russian Past: Anatolii Fomenko and the Rise of Alternative History in Post-Communist Russia (Ibidem-Verlag: Stuttgart, 2009). This is the first major study of Anatolii Fomenko, one of the most important Russian exponents of pseudo history or what the Russians call ‘alternative history’ in the post-Soviet era.

Dr Stephen Brown lectures in Russian history at the University of Wollongong. His interests include Soviet patriotism in World War Two, the revival of nationalism in the post-Soviet space and comparative nationalist mythologies in Europe and Asia. He has written extensively on the subject of Cossacks, the role of cavalry in Russian and Soviet history, and the hero-cults developed in the Stalin era.