Expertise

Area of expertise:

  • Central Eurasian Studies

As a historian, I am especially interested in Islam as practiced and thought by Turkic peoples in the Russian Empire

I am also involved in various comparative studies of the Enlightenment's impact on non-European cultures.


Much of my research continues to focus on the relationship between belief and knowledge in Eurasian commentary traditions—principally within the framework of the Russian Empire—and the impact of modernity on those traditions. Of particular interest is the fate of Islam as adhered to by Turkic peoples in the Volga-Kama, Black Sea, and Caucasus regions between the mid-eighteenth and early twentieth centuries


Keywords: Eurasian commentary traditions; intellectual developments within Turkic communities of Central Eurasia, 18th-20th centuries; Comparative study of early modern empires (Russian, Chinese, Ottoman, and Spanish)

Keywords:

  • 1350 to 1800
  • Russian and Eastern European History
  • Empire and Colonialism
Communities
History
Degrees
PhD, University of Washington, 1973