Socialist Imaginations: Utopias, Myths, and the Masses

About Julie Tottman

Stefan Arvidsson is professor in the history of religions at Linnæus University Sweden. His main interest concerns modern mythology. English publications include Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science (2006) and The style and mythology of socialism: socialist idealism 1871-1914 (2017).Jakub Bene is lecturer in modern European history at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the culture of workers and peasants movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century east central Europe. He is the author of Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria 1890-1918 (Oxford 2017). Anja Kirsch is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Basel whose main interest concerns the relation between religion and the secular in contemporary and historical perspective. She specializes in the relation of religion and the socialist worldview in the German Democratic Republic (Weltanschauung als Erzählkultur 2016); her research interests include narrative strategies of secular and religious social-revolutionary movements and utopias and transnational migration in the long nineteenth-century European history of religions.