Michael Khodarkovsky
Professor
Khodarkovsky is a historian of the Russian Empire who specializes in the history of the Russian imperial expansion into the Eurasian borderlands. His books examined the relationship between the expanding Russian state and the non-Christian peoples across the colonial frontier: (Cornell University Press, 1992), (Indiana University Press, 2002), and (Cornell University Press, 2011). He has explored the impact of organized religion, missionary work and religious conversion on Russia's non-Christian population and in a co-edited volume (Cornell University Press, 2001).
In 2016-18 he took a detour from his traditional interests to explore Russian and Soviet history in 100 vignettes, one for each year of the 20th century. The result was a book, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019; short-listed for the William Saroyan Prize for International Writing).
His latest book is (Yale University Press, 2026). It is a broad comparative history of the Eurasian empires that sets side by side the ideologies, policies and practices of the Russian empire with those of the Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, and Chinese empires between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.
In the last decade Khodarkovsky has lectured at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary; the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany; Humboldt Universität in Berlin; Georg-August Universität in Göttingen; Leibnitz Universität in Hannover; Hamburger Institut für Sozialforshchung; Kings College at the University of Cambridge; University College London, and the universities of Basel and Bern in Switzerland, Oxford University, Columbia University, Universities of Bamberg, Pittsburgh, UCLA, Amsterdam, Notre Dame, Beijing, Stockholm, Tokyo, Osaka, Hokkaido, Yale, Florence, Rome, Vienna, Georgetown, Freiburg, Münster, Manchester, York, Oxford, and LSE. Khodarkovsky has written over forty articles and essays published in English, French, Russian and German in a variety of journals, including Russian History, The Journal of Modern History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and The International Journal of Turkish Studies.
Khodarkovsky has served on various boards and executive committees, including the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2009-2012). He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship Program for Turkey (1983-1984), the Social Science Research Council (1989-1991), the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. (1992-93), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1995-1996), the National Council for Russian and East European Research (1996-1997 and 2006-2007), the American Council of Learned Societies (2001-2002), and the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin (Spring 2027).
He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago (2002-03, 2010), Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany (2011), University of Regensburg, Germany (2018), University of Hokkaido, Sapporo, Japan (2022), and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany (2010-11).
Research Interests
Imperial and Modern Russia, Imperial Borderlands, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Non-Russian peoples of Russia, Eurasia, Ottoman empire, Comparative Empires and Colonialisms, and Russian Orientalism.
Specialty Area
Russian History
Courses Taught
- HIST 102: The Evolution of the Western Ideas and Institutions since the Seventeenth Century
- HIST 340: Russia Pre-1917: Empire Building
- HIST 341: Russia and the USSR in the 20th Century
- HIST 530: Comparative Colonial Empires
- HIST 536: Nationalisms in Russia
Publications/Research Listings
(Yale University Press, 2026).
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).
” in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 52, no. 1 (2018), pp. 1-29.
(Cornell University Press, 2011; Russian translation, 2016).
(Indiana University Press, 2002; Polish translation, 2009; Russian translation, 2019).
, edited with Robert Geraci (Cornell University Press, 2001).
(Cornell University Press, 1992).