I came to the Middle East from the north, from Russia.  While studying Russian in Moscow as undergraduate, I befriended a number of people from the Caucasus – Dagestan, Chechnya, Ossetia Armenia, Azerbaijan, –  in what was then the Soviet Union.  They fascinated me, and after traveling to a friend's village in Dagestan I began to think I might like to study the region.  When I received my BA I returned to Russia and worked for two years for a law firm as a legal assistant.  It was a tremendous experience, but I decided that life was too short to spend doing corporate work.  I entered Columbia University's Political Science department to pursue a PhD with a thematic focus on international relations and a regional one on Eurasia and the Middle East.

Although I benefited tremendously from the instruction I received in social science methodologies and epistemology, including critiques of history as a scholarly endeavor, I ultimately decided that I found the field of history intellectually to be both more challenging and rewarding than contemporary political science.  I came to Princeton and took up the study of Ottoman and Russian-Soviet history as well as Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Islamic mysticism.  Because the Bolshevik Revolution and its significance for the twentieth century had long interested me, and I could see intriguing parallels between late Imperial Russian/Soviet history and Ottoman/Turkish republican history, I knew I wanted to do comparative  work on the final era of the Ottoman and Russian empires.  I left to spend a few years in Turkish and Russian archives doing research for my dissertation, which I defended in 2003.

In 2005 I came back to Princeton's Department of Near Eastern Studies as an assistant professor.  The courses I teach include Introduction to the Middle East; Nation, State, and Empire: the Ottoman, Romanov, and Hapsburg Experiences; Comparative Transformations in the Middle East and Eurasia; and War and Politics in the Modern Middle East.  I am on leave for 2007-2008 writing a book tentatively titled "Shattering Empires: the Ottoman-Russian Struggle for Anatolia and the Caucasus, 1908-1918."  My next project will involve an investigation of Muslim experiences of state-led secularism in the Middle East and Eurasia.

BA, Government and Slavic Languages and Literature, Harvard University
MA, Political Science, Columbia University
PhD, Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

Recent publications:

"Buffers, not Brethren: Young Turk Military Policy in the First World War and the Myth of Panturanism" Past and Present vol. 23 no. 1 (May, 2009): 137-179.

“Native Sons: Post-Imperial Politics, Islam, and Identity in the North Caucasus, 1917-1918,” Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas  56 (March 2008): 221-247.