The University of Illinois has long been a center for Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian studies. Leveraging these strengths, the Department of History offers a comprehensive graduate program in this field, with a proud tradition of mentoring new scholars and scholarship. We offer a comprehensive suite of thematic and survey courses at the graduate level, covering Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History, 1500 to the present. Our faculty have interests in political, social, cultural, and intellectual history, and investigate questions of race and ethnicity, citizenship, violence, toleration, gender, family life, the history of archives and sources, space, and communication.
Graduate students in History at Illinois also benefit from numerous campus resources. Illinois has dozens of faculty and staff with interests in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies (some of whom are listed below), in numerous departments across campus. Our Library is the home of one of the world’s great collections in the REEES field, which every year draws dozens of scholars from around the world to conduct research. The Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center (REEEC) at Illinois is a federally-designated National Resource Center, and offers Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for both academic year and summer study. Illinois hosts the editorial offices of our field’s flagship journal, The Slavic Review, and is also home to the celebrated research support specialists of the Slavic Reference Service. Scholars from Illinois regularly participate in conferences all over the globe, and we regularly host the Midwest Russian History Workshop. Other important campus resources for our program include The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Humanities Research Institute, and the School of Information Science, a hub of digital humanities and data science innovation on campus.
Drawing on these resources, graduate students at Illinois have the opportunity to develop as researchers, teachers, and scholars across their time at Illinois. They also develop professional skills and networks to sustain their careers afterwards.
Graduate Examinations in our field are developed through one-on-one consultations with faculty. Examinees develop their exam lists building from a Zotero library of scholarship we have built and maintain online.
Core faculty in the program:
Eugene M. Avrutin is the Tobor Family Endowed Professor of Modern European Jewish History and is the Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois. Since August 2023, he has served as the Editor of Slavic Review. He is the author and co-editor of several award-winning books, including Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Cornell University Press, 2010) and The Velizh Affair: Blood Libel in a Russian Town (Oxford University Press, 2018). Avrutin has published articles on documentation practices, the concept of race, and the problem of religious toleration and neighborly coexistence in the East European borderlands. Together with Elissa Bemporad (CUNY), he edited Pogroms: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2021), a collection of sources and short essays by leading scholars on the history of anti-Jewish violence over a span of six decades. His most recent book, Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin, came out in the Russian Shorts series with Bloomsbury in 2022, and is available as an open access resource here. He is currently at work on a longer book on everyday crime, imperial legal culture, and neighborly relations. His scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.
John Randolph specializes in Russian intellectual and cultural history, 1750–1850. His work focuses on the role played by imperial institutions in creating political, intellectual, and practical frameworks for modern Russian civilization. He is the author of The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism, published by Cornell University Press in 2007. This book won the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize (2008) given by ASEEES (for best first monograph in history), and the Best Book in Literary or Cultural Studies Prize (2008), given by AATSEEL. John’s new project, When I Served the Post as a Coachman, is a history of relay obligation in the eighteenth-century Russian Empire. It tells the story of how Imperial Russian subjects were required to provide horses, wagons, and drivers for Russia’s posts, and considers how this ancient system of obligation supported the making of modern Russian society and culture during the Empire’s “Golden Age.” John is also Founding Editor of the SourceLab initiative, a Digital Humanities program at Illinois that encourages students to develop skills in digital documentary editing. He currently serves as Director of the Russia, East European, and Eurasia Center (REEEC) at Illinois, a federally-funded National Resource Center that is part of the Illinois Global Institute.
Anna Whittington is a historian of citizenship and inequality in Soviet Eurasia. Her in-progress book manuscript, Repertoires of Citizenship: Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People, explores the discourses and practices of Soviet citizenship from the October Revolution to the Soviet collapse. Drawing on multilingual sources collected in more than 30 archives and libraries in nine countries in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, the book demonstrates that Soviet leaders promoted a civic identity built on active participation in public life. People embraced this vision of citizenship across a wide geographic and cultural spectrum, despite disparities in their claims to this identity. As the book shows, the Soviet rhetoric of equality, inclusion, and multiethnic representation coexisted with systemic inequalities that shaped lived experiences. Inclusion and inequality were both fundamental to the articulation and experience of Soviet citizenship. Anna has also begun research on additional projects that explore the history of enumeration in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union and public mobilization in the 1980s, which likewise draw on archival materials collected from across the former Soviet Union. Trained primarily as a historian, she has long been engaged in the interdisciplinary study of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, including languages and contemporary societies.
Faculty in other departments with expertise in Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian studies and who can serve on graduate exam and dissertation committees in history:
Donna Buchanan (School of Music: Musical southeastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union (particularly Russia); nationalism in Russian and East European classical music; ethnomusicology; Mussorgsky; Shostakovich.)
David Cooper (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures: Czech, Slovak, and Russian literatures)
Michael Finke (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures: 19th and 20th century Russian literature; aviation and popular culture)
Robert Geraci (University Library: Russian empire, nationalities, empire, commerce)
Jessica Greenberg (Department of Anthropology: Serbia/Yugoslavia; democracy; revolution; political communication; postsocialism; youth and student activism)
Valleri Robinson (Department of Theatre: Russian-American cultural exchange, Cold War performances, transnational theatre historiography, and Chekhov in translation and adaptation)
Kristin Romberg (Art History Program: 20th century Russian art, constructivism)
Valeria Sobol (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures: 19th century Russian literature)
Richard Tempest (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures: Russian intellectual history)
Dissertations Completed in Russian History since 2000
- Susan Smith, "Genesis of a Public Sphere in Russia: Vladimir Province, 1785-1861," 2000
- Jeffery Sahadeo, "Creating a Russian Colonial Community: City, Nation, and Empire in Tashkent, 18651923," 2000
- Marjorie Hilton, "Commercial Cultures: Modernity in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1880-1930," 2003
- Christine Varga-Harris, "Constructing the Soviet Hearth: Home, Citizenship, and Socialism in Russia, 1956-64," 2005
- Gregory Stroud, “Retrospective Revolution: A History of Time and Memory in Urban Russia, 1903-1923,” 2006
- Erica Fraser, “Masculinities in the Motherland: Gender and Authority in the Soviet Union During the Cold War, 1945-1968,” 2009
- Dmitry Tartakovsky, "Parallel Ruptures: Jews of Bessarabia and Transnistria Between Romanian Nationalism and Soviet Communism, 1918-1940," 2009
- Sharyl Corrado, "The 'End of the Earth': Sakhalin Island in the Russian Imperial Imagination, 1949-1906," 2010
- Randall Dills, "The River Neva and the Imperial Facade: Culture and Enviroment in Nineteenth-Century St. Petersburg, Russia," 2010
- Andy Bruno, “Making Nature Modern: Economic Transformation and the Environment in the Soviet North,” 2011.
- Rebecca Mitchell, “Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music and the Search for Unity in Revolutionary Russia, 1905-1921,” 2011
- Maria Cristina Galmarini, “The ‘Right to Be Helped’: Welfare Policies and Notions of Rights at the Margins of Soviet Society, 1917-1950”, 2012.
- Gregory Kveberg, “Moscow by Night: Musical Subcultures, Identity Formation, and Cultural Evolution in Russia, 1977-2008,” 2012
- Jesse Murray, “Community, Belonging, and Identity: Conversion in the Russian Empire, 1810-1917,” 2013
- Steven Jug, “All Stalin’s Men? Soldierly Masculinities in the Soviet War Effort, 1938-1945,” 2013
- Elana Jakel, “Ukraine without Jews?" Nationality and Belonging in Soviet Ukraine, 1943-1948,” 2014
- Rachel Koroloff, “Seeds of Exchange: Collecting for Russia’s Apothecary and Botanical Gardens in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 2014
- Patryk Reid, “Managing Nature, Constructing the State: The Material Foundation of Soviet Empire in Tajikistan, 1917-1937,” 2016
- Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman, "A Space Called Home: Housing and the Management of the Everyday in Russia, 1890-1935," 2018
- Benjamin Bamberger, "Mountains of Discontent: Georgian Alpinism and the Limits of Soviet Equality, 1923-1955," 2019
- Matthew Klopfenstein, "Performing death: Celebrity women's funerals and the emotional public sphere in late imperial Russia," 2021
- Elizabeth Abosch, "Soundtracking Sovietness: Daily life, Labor, and the Power of Song in Russia, 1920-1980" (2024)
- Franziska Yost, "Russian Blue: The Production of Queer Identity in 1990s Russia" (2024)