Associate Professor (1996)

Modern Russia and Russian Empire

Office Hours: Wed., 10:30-12:30 or by appt.

Office: 222 Randall Hall

Phone: (434) 924-6984

Fax: (434) 924-7891

Email: geracivirginia.edu

Education

Publications, Awards, and Activities

Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia, Cornell University Press, 2001. 

Coeditor (with Michael Khodarkovsky), Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, Cornell University Press, 2001.  

“Capitalist Stereotypes and the Economic Organization of the Russian Empire: The Case of the Tiflis Armenians,” in Michael Branch, ed., Research and Identity:  Non-Russian Peoples of the Russian Empire, 1800-1855 (Helsinki: SKS, forthcoming). 

“Minorities and Empire,” in Abbott Gleason, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Russian History (Basil Blackwell, 2009), pp. 243-260. 

“Genocidal Impulses and Fantasies in Imperial Russia,” in A. Dirk Moses, ed. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (Berghahn, 2008), pp. 343-371. 

“Sunday Laws and Ethno-Commercial Rivalry in the Russian Empire, 1880s-1914” (National Council on Eurasian and East European Research, 2006). 

“Kul’turnaia sud’ba imperii pod voprosom: musul’manskii Vostok v rossiiskoi etnografii XIX veka” (Manifest Cultural Destiny in Question: The Muslim East in 19th-Century Russian Ethnography) in I. Gerasimov, S. Glebov, A. Kaplunovskii, M. Mogil’ner, and A. Semenov, eds., Novaia imperskaia istoriia v postsovetskom prostranstve (New Imperial History of Russian and Eurasia) (Kazan: Ab Imperio, 2004), pp. 271-306. 

"Going Abroad or Going to Russia?: Orthodox Missionaries in the Kazakh Steppe, 1881-1917,” in Geraci and Khodarkovsky, eds., Of Religion and Empire, pp. 274-310. 

"Ethnic Minorities, Anthropology, and Russian National Identity on Trial: The Multan Case, 1892-96," Russian Review, (October 2000). Russian translation:  “Etnicheskie men’shinstva, etnografiia, i russkaia natsional’naia identichnost’ pered litsom suda:  Multanskoe delo 1892-1896 gg.,” in Aleksei Miller, Petr Kabytov and Paul Werth, eds., Rossiiskaia imperiia v sovremennoi zarubezhnoi literature (The Russian Empire in Contemporary Foreign Literature) (Moscow, 2005).  

 "Russian Orientalism at an Impasse: Tsarist Education Policy and the 1910 Conference on Islam," in Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini, eds., Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917. (Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 138-161.

"The Il'minskii System and the Controversy over Non-Russian Teachers and Priests in the Middle Volga," in Catherine Evtuhov, Boris Gasparov, Alexander Ospovat and Mark Von Hagen, eds., Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire (Moscow: OGI, 1997), pp. 325-348.

National Council on Eurasian and East European Research, Research Grant, 2004-2005.

International Research and Exchange Board (IREX) Individual Advanced Research Opportunity Grant, 2003-2004.

Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 1996.

Davis Center for Russian Studies, Harvard University, Post-Doctoral Fellowship, 1995-1996.

Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Research Scholar, 1994-1995.

Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Dissertation Fellowship, 1992-1993.

International Research and Exchange Board (IREX) Long-Term Research Exchange, Russia, 1991-1992.

Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 1987-1989, 1993-1994.

Current Research 

I am presently researching and writing a book called Imperial Bazaar:  Ethno-National Dimensions of Commerce in Russian Eurasia.  The book explores the implications of the extraordinary ethnic diversity of Russia’s urban trading and entrepreneurial classes primarily from the 18^th century to the 1917 revolution, with an epilogue on the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.  It addresses the ways in which ethnic Russians often struggled in the world of commerce to hold their own against successful merchants and producers from minority groups such as Germans, Tatars, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, and foreigners; the expression of economic nationalism to support Russians’ putative role as the empire’s dominant group; stereotypes about the commercial capabilities and behavior of different ethnic groups; and state policies defining the commercial rights of these groups.  The book also compares the ethnic dimensions of commercial life in several major cities of the empire.  Research on the project has taken me to archives and libraries not only around the Russian Federation but also (so far) in Ukraine, Latvia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.

With Prof. Laurie Manchester of Arizona State University, I am also working on a compilation of memoirs from tsarist Russia.