Yale University, PhD '09

BIOGRAPHY

I work on politics, culture, and ideas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia and Ukraine and on transnational connections between the Russian/Soviet empires and the rest of the world. I have strong interests in Jewish history and the history of antisemitism and the theory and practice of the digital humanities as well.

I am close to finishing my third book, provisionally entitled Forging The Protocols: How Swindlers, Opportunists, and a Host of Historical Accidents Created the Most Notorious Conspiracy of All Time. The book is a "biography" of the notorious antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Telling the stories of the many authors and works on which the text draws—which include adventure novels, political satires, and family sagas—it asks how these diverse sources came together to form a single, monstrous libel. Shedding new light on the enduring mystery of the forgery's origins, I reconstruct how an international group of adventurers collectively co-authored the text over the course of several decades. The book also reflects on how the surprising story of The Protocols' creation changes how we should read it. 

Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Exiles and the Quest for Freedom, 1830–1930, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. It is the recipient of the 2022 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize from ASEEES, which recognizes the most important contribution in any discipline of Slavic studies. The book provides the first synthetic account of Europe's "Russian colonies"—boisterous and politically fractious communities formed by exiles from the Russian empire that emerged across the continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book treats the "Russian colonies" as utopian communities in which radical activists worked to transform social relations and individual behavior, and it explores how these unique spaces influenced Russian political imaginaries as well as the culture of their host societies. Ultimately, the project offers a bold reassessment of Russia's relationship with Europe, the origins of the Russian revolution, and the creation of the Bolshevik regime.

My first book, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013 and released in paperback in 2017. Children of Rus' argues that it was on the extreme periphery of the tsarist empire—a region that today is located at the very center of the independent nation of Ukraine—that Russian nationalism first took shape and assumed its most potent form. The book reconstructs how nineteenth-century provincial intellectuals came to see local folk customs as the purest manifestation of an ancient nation that unified all the Orthodox East Slavs, and how they successfully propagated their ideas across the empire through lobbying and mass political mobilization. In addition, it reconceptualizes state-society relations under tsarism, showing how residents of a diverse and contested peripheral region managed to shape political ideas and identities across Russia—and even beyond its borders. Children of Rus' was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.

My current research is enriched by technology, and I am interested in thinking through how historians can use digital tools to open new avenues for exploration and to communicate their findings to other scholars and the general public. I have used geo-spatial analysis to analyze flows of people, ideas, and commodities over time and across space and I am incorporating text mining into my “biography” of The Protocols. For examples of my (ongoing) work in digital humanities, see my Utopia's Discontents website and my study of émigré publications.

I was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2026. I have held research fellowships at Columbia, Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. My research has been funded by ACLS, IREX, Fulbright-Hays, and the NEH.

I am represented by Kathleen Anderson (kathleen@andersonliterary.com) of Anderson Literary Management.agement.