Bruce Grant

Professor and Chair

Education

Ph.D. 1993, Rice University; B.A. 1985, McGill University.

Areas of Research/Interest

Former Soviet Union, Siberia, the Caucasus; cultural history and politics; religion.

BIOGRAPHY

Bruce Grant is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at New York University. A specialist on cultural politics in the former Soviet Union, he has done fieldwork in both Siberia and the Caucasus. He is author of In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton 1995), a study of the Sovietization of an indigenous people on the Russian Pacific coast, and winner of the Prize for Best First Book from the American Ethnological Society; as well as The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell 2009), on the making of the Caucasus in the Russian popular imagination. He was co-editor of Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area (LIT 2007) and The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke 2010). His current research explores the early twentieth-century, pan-Caucasus journal Molla Nasreddin (1905-1931) as an idiom for rethinking contemporary Eurasian space and authoritarian rule within it.

He has been the recipient of grants from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, NCEEER (the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research), NEH, NSF, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He is a recent past president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, interdisciplinary wing of the American Anthropological Association; and ASEEES, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Fellowship and Honors

  • 2019 Hallsworth Visiting Professorship, University of Manchester
  • 2017 Foreign Visitor Fellowship, Slavic Research Center, University of Hokkaido, Japan
  • 2016-2017 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship
  • 2016 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award
  • 2012-2013 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
  • 2010 NYU Teaching Award
  • 2010 Honorable Mention for Harvard Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies
  • 2008-2009 American Philosophical Society (APS) Sabbatical Fellowship
  • 2008-2009 Wenner-Gren Foundation Research Grant
  • 2004-2006 National Council of Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), Research Grant
  • 2004-2005 Membership, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
  • 2004 Getty Museum Fellowship, “Monuments of the Middle East,” Istanbul
  • 2002 American Councils (ACTR/ACCELS) Advanced Research Fellowship
  • 2000-2001 ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship, held at the National Humanities Center
  • 1996 American Ethnological Society Prize for Best Book in Anthropology by a First Author
  • 1995 NEH Summer Stipend for College Teachers
  • 1994 Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies Short-Term Grant, Washington, DC
  • 1993 Postdoctoral Fellow, Harriman Institute, Columbia University, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC)

Selected Publications

Slippage: An Anthropology of Shamanism. Annual Review of Anthropology 50: 9-22.

Satire and Political Imagination in the Caucasus: The Sense and Sensibilities of Molla Nasreddin Acta Slavica Iaponica 40 (2020): 1-18. 

Missing Links: Indigenous Life and Evolutionary Thought in the History of Russian Ethnography. Berichte zu Wissenschaftsgeschicte 43 (2020): 119-140.

The Edifice Complex: Architecture and the Political Life of Surplus in the New Baku, Public Culture, 26, no. 3, (2014): 501-528.

We Are All Eurasian, NewsNet: Bulletin of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 52, no. 1 (2012): 1-6.

Recognizing Soviet Culture, in Reconstructing the House of Culture, Joachim Otto Habeck and Brian Donahoe, eds. (New York: Berghahn Press, 2012), 263-276.

Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Azerbaijan, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 3 (2011): 654-681.

Cosmopolitan Baku. Ethnos 75, no. 2 (2010): 123-147.

[Editor] The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics [with Adele Barker]. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

*Honorable Mention for the Harvard Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies

[Editor] Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area [with Lale Yalçın-Heckmann]. Berlin: LIT, 2007.

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] 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] Neotraditionalism in the Russian North: Indigenous Peoples and the Legacy of Perestroika, by Aleksandr Pika. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.

"The Return of the Repressed: Conversations with Three Russian Entrepreneurs," in Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation, edited by George Marcus, 241-267. Chicago: University of Chicago 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.

"Dirges for Soviets Passed: Conversations with Six Russian Writers," in Perilous States: Conversations on Culture, Politics, and Nation, edited by George Marcus, 17-51. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

"Siberia Hot and Cold: Reconstructing the Image of Siberian Indigenous Peoples," in Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, edited by Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine, 227-253. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.n.