University of Tartu (Estonia)
David Ilmar Beecher is lecturer of Political Thought and Cultural History at Tartu’s Skytte Institute of Political Study. He earned his PhD in European and Russian History at the University of California Berkeley in 2014 with a dissertation on the University of Tartu as an observatory upon European and Russian relations across four centuries. As a Fulbright Scholar, Visiting Professor of the Estonian Diaspora and lecturer he has a wide variety of courses in English and Estonian at Berkeley and Tartu on world history, human rights, nations and empires, Europe and Russia, political economy, and universities and dissidents. His most recent research interest has been the official Stalinist doctrine of the “Friendship of the Peoples”, and its role in various late Soviet movements for national independence and international solidarity, including the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization.