Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-states and Beyond

Book excerpt: Inhaltsverzeichnis: Symbolic patterns and interactional dynamics in ruler personality cults : state of the art and open questions / Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov -- "Personality cults" : the career of the contested notion / Dmitri Zakharine -- The mechanisms of cult production : an overview / Xavier Marquez -- Making the cult of personality from bottom up : the case of seventeenth-century Mughal India / Ali Anooshahr -- A personality cult against one's will? Traits and trajectories of popular veneration of Emperor Alexander I (r. 1801-1825) / Darin Stepanov -- Of death and dominion : Queen Victoria and the cult of colonial loyalty / John Plunkett -- The magic mirror : supplicant letters and the role of false equivalences in shaping ruler dominance / Eva Giloi -- Father of the people, face of the nation : continuities and splits in premodern foundations of modern ruler personality cults / Alexey Tikhomirov -- The image of Josip Broz Tito in post-Yugoslavia : between national and local memory / Tamara Trošt -- Deification, canonization and random signaling : upholding and sustaining personality cults / Kirill Postoutenko -- 'We thank you, our beloved leader!' the origins and evolution of Nicolae Ceaușescu's cult of personality / Manuela Marin -- Embodied practices of leadership : the case of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan / Charlotte Joppien -- Symbolic patterns and interactional dynamics in ruler personality cults : responding to questions and formulating ideas for future research / Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov.