About
Catherine Helen Gibson is an Associate Professor of East European Studies at the University of Tartu’s Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies (since 2025). Previously, she held roles including Lecturer in East European and Eurasian Studies (2022–2024) and Research Fellow in Church History at the School of Theology and Religious Studies (2019–2022). She earned her PhD in History from the European University Institute (2019) and holds master’s degrees from the University of Tartu, University College London, and the University of St Andrews.
Her research focuses on the intersection of cartography, empire history, and border studies, particularly in the Russian Empire’s Baltic provinces. Key themes include ethnographic mapping, census resistance, and the spatial history of imperial connections. She has received awards such as the 2024 Young Scholars Prize and the 2023 Baltic Geopolitics Programme Publication Prize.
Gibson leads major grants like the EU-funded Empire of Solidarities (€1.5M) and the Estonian Research Council’s Entangled Borderlands. She serves on editorial boards (e.g., Journal of Baltic Studies), chairs conferences, and co-edits the Peripheral Histories? digital project. Her work bridges historical methodology with contemporary geopolitical discourse, as seen in analyses of Kaja Kallas’ Ukraine-related social media activity.
Administratively, she chairs the Annual Tartu Conference on East European Studies and judges the BASEES Women’s Forum Prize. Her academic affiliations include the Royal Historical Society, ASEEES, and AABS. She has supervised postdoctoral researchers on topics like urban governance in the Romanov Empire and Dorpat/Iuriev student fraternities.
