Associate Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D. 1993, Rice University; B.A. 1985, McGill University.

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Research Interests:

The former Soviet Union, Siberia, the Caucasus; Azerbaijan; (post-) Soviet cultural politics; shamanism; Islam; cinema; histories of anthropology.

Selected Works:

The Gift of Empire: Sovereignty and the Arts of Persuasion in Russia and the Caucasus. Cornell University Press. In progress.

The Russia Reader: Culture, History, Politics. [co-edited with Adele Barker]. Duke University Press. In progress.

Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area. [co-edited with Lale Yalçın-Heckman]. LIT Verlag. In progress.

The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains. Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2005): 39-67.

"An Average Azeri Village" (1930). Slavic Review 63, no. 4 (2004): 705-731.

"New Moscow Monuments, or, States of Innocence." American Ethnologist 28, no. 2 (2001): 332-362.

[Editor, Author of Foreword and Afterword] The Social Organization of the Gilyak, by Lev Shternberg. New York and Seattle: American Museum of Natural History and the University of Washington Press, 1999.

[Editor, Author of Introduction, and Team Translator] Neotraditionalism in the Russian North: Indigenous Peoples and the Legacy of Perestroika, by Aleksandr Pika. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.

In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
*Winner of the Prize for Best First Book awarded by the American Ethnological Society, 1996

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