Blog Conversations

Russian History Blog periodically hosts “blog conversations,” in which one of our bloggers invites a group of guest blogger specialists to an interactive conversation about a particular topic or publication. The blog conversations provide several advantages over the typical academic journal book review. First, they allow for real-time interaction among the participants and include the blog readership in the conversation through comments and questions on the various postings from the guest bloggers.  Second, the blog conversations allow a more timely discussion of new books than the academic journal publication process, while also being more open to revisiting older historical monographs and other forms of historical publication. Third, the blog conversations are open access, furthering one of the main goals of Russian History Blog–bringing academic history out from behind the pay wall. The format is not fundamentally new, of course. Other conversations like Crooked Timber’s “seminars” and H-Diplo’s roundtables showed the way, but we at Russian History Blog hope here for something less formal and more fluid than those precedents.