이승은 ｜ 李承恩

sel9@st-andrews.ac.uk

PhD Candidate, School of History, University of St Andrews (UK)

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Seungeun Lee is a PhD candidate in History at the University of St Andrews, supervised by Professor Richard Whatmore. Her doctoral research explores the engagement of Catherine II’s Russia with the European Enlightenments in Poland, France, Italy, Switzerland, Britain and other states. Focusing on an era when commerce emerged as a reason of state, Seungeun’s thesis examines how Russia grappled with challenges comparable to those faced by other European nations. Through this study she aims to bridge diverse strands of historiography with a view to renewing the understanding of Enlightenments.

Responsibilities

• Organiser for IHW 2026: “Bureaucracy and development: new perspectives on modernity” (21 Sep 2026)
• Interviewer for the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History Podcast

Presentations

• “Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s federative Realpolitik in the cases of Poland-Lithuania and America,” St Andrews Postgraduate Modern History Seminar (Mar 2026)
• “The Partitions of Poland at the crossroads of eighteenth-century Europe’s small state-large state problem,” British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (BSECS) (Jan 2026)
• “Russia as a mirror to revolutionary France: Pierre Nicolas Chantreau’s Voyage … fait en Russie (1794),” Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF) (Sep 2025)
• “Debates on economic development in eighteenth-century Russian Enlightened monarchy,” Intellectual History Workshop of the Global Intellectual History Unit (GIHU), Sungkyunkwan University (Oct 2023)
• “Devising a Russian commercial society: Catherine II’s Legislative Commission,” Korean Society of Russian History (Mar 2023)

Articles

• “예카테리나 2세의 입법위원회와 러시아의 상업화 논의 Catherine II’s Legislative Commission and Designs for a Russian Commercial Society,” 서양사연구, 70 (2024), pp. 215–258.

Translations

• Korean co-translation of Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (Seoul, forthcoming).
• Korean co-translation of a selection of Catherine II’s letters (Seoul, 2022): 김민철ㆍ이승은 공역, 예카테리나 서한집, 서울: 읻다, 2022.

Podcast Interviews

• with Robert Frost on the forthcoming volumes of The Oxford History of Poland-Lithuania (November 2025).
• with Davide Cadeddu on Classics of historiography in historical and global perspective (Cambridge, forthcoming) (April 2025).
• with Isaac Nakhimovsky on The Holy Alliance: Liberalism and the Politics of Federation (Princeton, 2024) (October 2024).