This year while I’m on a research fellowship, I’m helping the University of Utah’s Asia Center to organize an interdisciplinary conference. We’re planning it around the theme of “Asi...
https://russianhistoryblog.org/2017/09/cfp-asia-in-the-russian-imagination/
The more time I’ve spent thinking about the Chuck Steinwedel’s excellent Threads of Empire, the more I’m taken by the idea of imperial threads. The intertwined purpose of policy is diffic...
https://russianhistoryblog.org/2017/01/untangling-ideas-with-imperial-threads/
Welcome to our new blog conversation on Erika Monahan’s remarkable The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell University Press, 2016). Erika’s book is a comprehensive ...
https://russianhistoryblog.org/2016/09/the-merchants-of-siberia-a-blog-conversation/
The British expat community found living in Russia to be a great hardship, regularly complaining about the inhospitable weather and its remote location. Even worse, Russia was expensive, especial...
https://russianhistoryblog.org/2016/05/shopping-in-moscow-1705/
While I was moving some stuff around my office, I rediscovered my copy of Kazan’s Mother of God icon. I haven’t really thought about it since I wrote my first book, but I had recently come ...
https://russianhistoryblog.org/2016/03/travel-tales-and-unreliable-informants/
Just this week a new online journal for Russian Studies arrived, The Journal of Frontier Studies/Zhurnal frontirnykh issledovanii. It is being edited by a group of scholars at Astrakhan State U...
A few years ago Steve Barnes was visiting Hawaii to give a talk on his work on campus here at UH. He spent a bit of time at our Library, and came across an unusual find in our special collections...
https://russianhistoryblog.org/2015/04/the-1936-guide-book-of-the-soviet-union/
Over the past couple of months, I have been following with increasing apprehension the news from Russia about its treatment of its gay population. Yesterday, a blogger at Gawker summarized the re...
https://russianhistoryblog.org/2013/07/russia-and-homosexual-propaganda/
Back when I was an undergrad, my advisor said something that has remained with me since: if you want to know what’s current in Russian historiography, just look at what the rest of the field wa...
https://russianhistoryblog.org/2012/11/contemplating-the-history-of-the-senses-or-did-russia-stink/
I have an uneasy relationship with using films in my classroom. Since I most often teach early modern history, I tend to avoid the whole genre because I’d prefer to avoid ahistorical images i...