Oshank Hashemi is affiliated with the research group GCSEES. After completing his BA and MA degrees at Leiden University, the Netherlands, he was awarded the Peter Baehr Award in 2016 for the best PhD research proposal. During this period, he successfully reworked his master’s thesis into the peer-reviewed article “Symbolists’ Myths about N. V. Gogol’ (Based on Literary Criticism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century).”
From 2018 to 2025, he lived in Belgium, where he held a BOF PhD Fellowship at Ghent University. His dissertation is situated at the intersection of cultural studies, political science, and cultural sociology. He employed a dynamic approach in which he examined various top-down strategies of identity politics during Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term, with a particular focus on how the state apparatus appropriated and instrumentalized Russia’s classical literary heritage. His analysis combined textual analysis with “living” empirical manifestations of identity politics, including various case studies, such as school education, the literary curriculum and canon formation, the state-led mediatization of Pushkin’s figure in films and television series, the embodiment of national identity in the activities of charismatic personalities representing state power, and the organization of media rituals and performative practices in which Putin actively participated. His analysis also encompassed the reception of these strategies in the Russian media and among cultural representatives.
He successfully defended his dissertation, The Instrumentalization of Russia’s Literary Heritage as a Strategy of National Identity Politics during Vladimir Putin’s Third Presidential Term (2012–2018), in November 2025.