I joined the UNM History department in 2008. My work for a small company in Russia during the 1990's sparked my interest in the history of enterprise in Russia.  This, coupled with an interest in borderlands and frontiers, led me to write a dissertation that examines merchants and their practices in Siberia during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. That project became my first book, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell University Press, 2016).

I currently have three ongoing projects. The first is a book project, tentatively titled “Spinning Russia: Nicolaas Witsen and the Making of Russia’s Image in Europe”, which investigates the work of Nicolaas Witsen (1641–1717)—a Dutchman who devoted himself to amassing information about the peoples, places, and history of Eurasia—in order to reexamine circulation of knowledge about Russia and Eurasia in the early modern era. Investigating representations of Eurasian indigenous peoples and the cartographical traditions on which Witsen drew are components of this project. Second, growing out of my first book, I am continuing to explore Bukharan merchants and imperial intermediaries in a broader Eurasian context and into the nineteenth century.

Third, Bloomsbury Publishers has commissioned me to write a revised and expanded second edition of Lindsey Hughes’ The Romanovs: Ruling Russia, 1613–1917.

I teach courses on Rus’, Muscovy, the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and Russia from the ninth century to the present in a three-semester narrative sequence. I also teach courses on the history of the Russian empire, Environmental History and Russia in a larger European and global context. I teach graduate seminars in Early Modern Commerce (Cultures of Exchange; Capitalism: A Prequel) and Eurasian Borderlands. My teaching and research touch all of our department’s thematic concentrations, while my publications to date fit most squarely in our Frontiers & Borderlands and Politics & Economy concentrations.  If you are a potential graduate student interested in working with me at UNM, please send me an email.

If you are a scholar of Slavic studies interested in reviewing a book for Canadian-American Slavic Studies, please email me about your areas of expertise along with a CV and we will see about getting you paired with an appropriate book.