Is there an essential Russian identity? What happens when ""Russian"" literature is written in English, by such authors as Gary Shteyngart or Lara Vapnyar? What is the geographic ""home"" of Russian culture created and shared via the internet? Global Russian Cultures innovatively considers these and many related questions about the literary and ......
The earliest surviving instance of sustained first-person travel narrative in Arabic Mission to the Volga is a pioneering text of peerless historical and literary value. In its pages, we move north on a diplomatic mission from Baghdad to the upper reaches of the Volga River in what is now central Russia. In this colorful documentary from the ......
As the most populous country in Eastern Europe as well as the birthplace of the largest anticommunist dissident movement, Poland is crucial in understanding the end of the Cold War. During the 1980s, both the United States and the Soviet Union vied for influence over Poland's politically tumultuous steps toward democratic revolution. In this ......
Women, Religion, and Ethnicity in the American South
An exploration of an embodied, practice-centered, and continuous process through which Orthodox Christian women in the American South cultivate a compelling religious womanhood. Becoming Orthodox is a multi-lingual, ethnographic study of two Orthodox Christian communities in the U.S. Utilizing interview material, participant observation, and ......
Women, Religion, and Ethnicity in the American South
An exploration of an embodied, practice-centered, and continuous process through which Orthodox Christian women in the American South cultivate a compelling religious womanhood. Becoming Orthodox is a multi-lingual, ethnographic study of two Orthodox Christian communities in the U.S. Utilizing interview material, participant observation, and ......
Aleksandr Aleksandrov, Transsexuality, and Imperial Russia
Aleksandr Aleksandrov was an author and soldier in service of the Russian tsar, active in the Prussian theater of the War of the Fourth Coalition (1806-7) and in the Napoleonic wars. In scholarship, he is better known by his birth name, Nadezhda Andreevna Durova, and often referred to with the female pronouns bestowed upon him at birth. In this ......
Paper Bridges Between Franz Boas and Russian Anthropology
Anthropology is inseparable from writing, whether in field diaries, letters, articles, or books. Among these writings, letters form paper bridges-holding a special place as material artifacts uniquely capable of building scholarly communities and sustaining relationships with field collaborators long after the fieldwork is completed. The story of ......
Space, Nuclear Weapons, and US-Russia Relations After the Cold War
Russian officials and experts often voice the view that the United States was hell-bent on undermining, even destroying Russia during the turbulent period of the Soviet breakup thirty years ago. The primary US goal, in this telling, was to expand NATO to Russia's borders to isolate and threaten the Russian state. Rose Gottemoeller, drawing from ......
How officials in bureaucratic institutions in Tajikistan, though well-meaning, create a postcolonial, problematic "migrant" Making Migrants explores the postcolonial life of institutions and law in Tajikistan, finding that bureaucratic spaces render people who seek to work abroad into the subjective construct of a "migrant." Anthropologist ......
