People

Stephen M. Kotkin
Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Professor of International Affairs
History Department and Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University

Stephen Kotkin joined the Princeton faculty in 1989. He directed Princeton's Russian and Eurasian Studies Program between 1996 and 2009. He is a former chairman of the editorial board at Princeton University Press. In the academic field he is a member of the Social Science Research Council, Committee on Russia and Eurasia (2001) and has long been an editorial board member for International Labor and Working Class History, as well as acting in a number of other positions in Rem Koolhass Harvard Project on the City, Kritika: Explorations in European and Eurasian History, and many other organizations.

His research interests range across Eurasia, from Japan to Britain, in the modern period, and include topics such as authoritarianism, geopolitics, empire, nation building, political corruption, modernity and modernism. His degrees are: University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 1988; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 1983; University of Rochester, B.A., 1981.

Outside Princeton, he serves as the lead academic consultant in emerging markets for the World Pension Forum, an umbrella organization for institutional investors.  He also works as a consultant, investigator, and strategist for the Open Society Institute (Soros), Ford Foundation, and other agencies in post-Communist higher education.  From 2006 (until taking a break in February 2009) he has been the regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section.