In the 19th and early 20th centuries Kyiv was an important city in the European part of the Russian Empire, rivalling Warsaw in economic and strategic significance. The city also held the pre-eminent spiritual and ideological role of the Russian Empire's own Jerusalem. The book Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905 examines issues of space, urban planning, socio-spatial form, and perceptions of change in imperial Kyiv. It combines cultural and social history with urban studies, and uses a wide range of unpublished archival materials. It also explores the general culture of imperial urbanism in Eastern Europe.
Dr. Serhiy Bilenky is a research associate at the Peter Jacyk Centre for Ukrainian Historical Research, CIUS. He is the author of the monographs Mykhailo Maksymovych ta osvitni praktyky na Pravoberezhnii Ukraїni u pershii polovyni XIX stolittia (Mykhailo Maksymovych and Educational Practices in Right-Bank Ukraine in the First Half of the 19th Century; Kyiv, 1999) and Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford University Press, 2012), as well as numerous articles on Romantic nationalism in Eastern Europe, the city of Kyiv, and Kyiv University.