Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Politics and culture in late Imperial Russia
- Russian identity, Russian nationalism
- Historiography of modern Russia
- Political violence
- Memory
Current research
In the earliest part of my career, I looked at right-wing nationalists in late imperial Russia. This was the subject of my first monograph, The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia: Dreams of a True Fatherland (Routledge, 2016), which was nominated for the Alec Nove Prize in Russian and East European Studies. The work assessed the changing social dynamics of the populist-nationalist radical right as it emerged in the early twentieth century in Russia. Key concepts examined were national identity, the use of anti-Semitism and the adoption of violence by the major groups assessed.
Following this, I focused on studies of political (mostly secular) martyrdom and martyrology in the revolutionary period in Russian history. The book project connected to this examines cases from 1881 to 1918 and has the unique selling point of assessing cases from right across the socio-political spectrum, from the nationalist right through to revolutionary examples and even Russia’s liberals. A monograph Martyr Cults in Revolutionary Russia is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic, and research articles appearing in (for instance) The Russian Review and The Slavonic and East European Review (both 2022) consider different historical examples.
I am an enthusiastic educator, and this is also reflected in my publications. I edited Reading Russian Sources (2020), part of Routledge’s Guides to Historical Sources series, which won Best Historical Materials for 2020 and 2021 from the American Library Association. I am contracted to write a textbook on late imperial Russia for Routledge together with my colleague Jennifer Keating, titled New Directions in Late Imperial Russia.