About

I am a historian of U.S.–Russian relations, American foreign policy, and the politics of memory. My work examines how nations imagine themselves through others, how foreign policy becomes a language of national identity, and how interpretations of the past enter public debate and political conflict.

Much of my research has focused on the long history of Russian and American mutual perceptions. I have written on Russian views of the United States in the nineteenth century, American foreign policy as a form of national self-definition, and the changing place of Russia in American political imagination. My current research returns to the era of the American Civil War and asks how the conflict was interpreted outside the United States, especially in Russia, where debates over slavery, democracy, empire, reform, and revolution intersected with Russia’s own experience of emancipation and political change.

My recent English-language books include Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: A History of American–Russian Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2025), co-authored with David S. Foglesong and Victoria I. Zhuravleva; Battle for the Past: How Politics Rewrites History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025); and Americans and All the Rest: Identity and Foreign Policy in U.S. History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), the English edition of my 2024 Prosvetitel Prize-winning Russian book.

I am currently Visiting Professor of History at The Ohio State University, where I teach courses on U.S.–Russian relations and the global dimensions of the American Civil War. Previously, I was Professor of History and International Relations at the European University at St. Petersburg, Head of the Department of International Relations and Area Studies at Volgograd State University, and held visiting appointments at Wellesley College, Bowdoin College, Dartmouth College, George Washington University, and Middlebury College.

My teaching is closely connected to my research. I ask students to treat history as a field of interpretation, argument, and public use: a discipline concerned not only with what happened, but also with how societies explain the past, mobilize it, and fight over its meaning. In courses on U.S.–Russian relations, Civil War and Reconstruction, and the uses and misuses of history, I emphasize comparative perspectives, primary sources, and the movement between historical evidence and political language.

Since 2024, my academic work has continued in the United States after my dismissal from the European University at St. Petersburg following my public opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine. In 2026, the Russian Ministry of Justice designated me a “foreign agent.” This experience has made the politics of history not only a subject of research, but also part of the institutional context in which my work now unfolds.