I grew up in Newton Massachusetts just outside Boston. I graduated from high
school in 1979 and went on to do my undergraduate work at Oberlin College in Ohio, where I
majored in history and took electives in music, art and the Russian language.
The summer after my graduation in 1984 I traveled to the Soviet Union for the first time on the
CIEE exchange program. In September 1986, after a two year interval in which I taught
English as a Second Language and worked at the Emerson College library in Boston, I
entered the graduate program in Russian history at Columbia University. I received my
Masters’ degree in 1989 and passed my oral exams the following year. In 1991, I went
to Russia on an IREX grant to carry out my dissertation research. In the year that
followed I witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and experienced first hand the
economic, social and political disruption facing Russian society during that turbulent
period. After a brief stint back in America in the fall of 1992, I returned to Russia and
for the next three years divided my time between Boston and St. Petersburg.
In December 1994 at Columbia
University, I defended my doctoral dissertation entitled "Constructing the Science of
Nationality: Ethnography in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia." After spending most of
1995 in Russia working in the archives, I returned to the US in January 1996 to begin
teaching, first as an adjunct and then as a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire.
In the summer of 1997, I moved to Washington where I was a research fellow at the Kennan
Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. The following January, I returned to the Harriman
Institute at Columbia University for a post-doctoral fellowship. I began teaching in
September 1998 at Seton Hall University where I am currently an Associate
Professor of History and Director of the Russian and East European Studies Program.