Research

I consider myself a global scholar who studied, taught and conducted research in Russia, USA and in a number of European countries. This professional trajectory reflects my interest in the studies of (imperial) diversity, in political and intellectual organization of complex, multi-national and multi-cultural societies. My field of specialization can be broadly defined as a New Imperial History of Russia and the USSR.

Currently I am working on a book project dedicated to Jewish race scientists and intellectuals who, for different reasons and in different contexts, insisted that Jewishness was based on race. One line of my inquiry reconstructs the intellectual communicative space of Jewish race science—its international dimension as well as its specific Russian imperial version. Another line consists in revising Russian-Jewish political (Russian Zionism), cultural (literary and linguistic debates), and medical discourses and practices in the light of the racialized understanding of modern Jewishness. Ultimately, I intend to show how the Russian-Jewish intellectual “romance” with race, so typical of the epoch of “nations and nationalisms,” was facilitated by the specific Russian imperial situation.

Parallel to this, I am engaged in a collective project of writing a new college textbook on Russian/Eurasian history that aims to integrate the most valuable achievements of the new imperial history approach (most important—the idea of studying the process of organizing, rationalizing, and making sense of human diversity).

Books:

Co-author: A New Imperial History of Northern Eurasia: From Russian to Global History, Vol. 1: 600-1700 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). 

Jews, Race, and the Politics of Difference: The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky against the Russian Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023).

A Race for the Future: Scientific Visions of Modern Russian Jewishness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).

Volume editor: A Cultural History of Race in the Age of Empire and Nation State (1760–1920), in the 6-volume series “A Cultural History of Race” (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). 

Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (=Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology series) (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013).

Homo imperii: istoriia fizicheskoi antropologii v Rossii [Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia] (Moscow: New Literary Review, 2008).

Mifologiia “podpol’nogo cheloveka:” radikal’nyi mikrokosm v Rossii nachala XX veka kak predmet semioticheskogo analiza [Mythology of the “Underground Man:” Russian Radical Microcosm in the Early Twentieth Century as an Object of Semiotic Analysis] (Moscow: New Literary Review, 1999).

Krizis radikal’nogo soznaniia v Rossii, 1907−1914 [The Crisis of Radical Consciousness in Russia, 1907–1914] (Moscow: OSI; Magistr, 1997).

Recent articles and chapters:

• “When Race Is a Language and Empire Is a Context,” Slavic Review, Critical Forum on Race and Bias 80, no. 2 (Summer 2021):  207–215. 

• “Mediterraneanizing Europe: The Project of Subaltern Race and the Postimperial Search for Hybridity,” ISIS, A Journal of the History of Science Society 112, no. 4 (2021): 670–693. 

• “Three Roads to Modernity at the Turn of the ‘Jewish Century’: Boasian Revolution, Imperial Revolution, and Bolshevik Revolution,” Ab Imperio 19, no. 2 (2018): 27–67. 

• “The Empire-Born Criminal: Atavisms, Survivals, Irrational Instincts, and the Fate of Russian Imperial Modernity,” in The Born and the Common Criminal. The Discourse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russian and Early Soviet Union, eds. Riccardo Nicolosi, Anne Hartmann, and Marc Junge (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 31–62.

• “Human Sacrifice in the Name of a Nation: The Religion of Common Blood,” in Ritual Murder in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Beyond: New Histories of an Old Accusation, eds. Eugene Avrutin, Robert Weinberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 130–150.

• “Prirozhdennyi prestupnik v imperii: atavism, perezhitki, bessoznatelnye instinkty i sud'by rossiiskoi imperskoi modernosti,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 144 (2017): 318–341.

• with Ilya Gerasimov and Sergei Glebov, “Gibridnost': Marrizm i voprosy iazyka imperskoi situatsii,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 144 (2017): 174–206.

• “Racial Psychiatry and the Russian Imperial Dilemma of the “Savage Within”,” East Central Europe 43 (2016): 99–133.

• with Ilya Gerasimov and Sergey Glebov, “Hybridity: Marrism and the Problems of Language of the Imperial Situation,” Ab Imperio 17, no. 1 (May 2016): 1–39

• “Between Scientific and Political: Jewish Scholars and Russian-Jewish Physical Anthropology in the Fin-de-Siècle Russian Empire,” in Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse, ed. Jeffrey Veidlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 45–63.

• with Ilya Gerasimov, “Deconstructing Integration: Ukraine’s Postcolonial Subjectivity,” Slavic Review 74, no. 4 (winter 2015): 715–722.

• “New Imperial History: Post-Soviet Historiography in Search of a New Paradigm for the History of Empire and Nationalism,” Revue d'études comparatives Est-Ouest 45, no. 2 (2014): 25−67.

• “Beyond, Against, and With Ethnography: Physical Anthropology as a Science of Russian Modernity,” in Knowing Me, Counting You. A Knowledge History of Ethnography in Imperial and Soviet Russia, ed. Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013).

• With Ilya Gerasimov and Alexander Semyonov, “Russian Sociology in Imperial Context,” in Sociology and Empire, ed. George Steinmetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

• “Toward a History of Russian-Jewish ‘Medical Materialism’: Russian-Jewish Physicians and the Politics of Jewish Biological Normalization,” Jewish Social Studies 19, no. 1 (2012): 70−106.