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I am a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union with a strong interdisciplinary track record. My research and teaching cover all periods of Russian history and culture, and some aspects of Eastern European history. More recently I have developed an interest in New Imperial History with a particular focus on the South Caucasus. Holding a MA from the University of Munich, a PhD from Georgetown University, a second doctorate (Habilitation) from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, I have been teaching at leading universities in the US, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom.

My first monograph on patriotism during World War I helped to establish this 'forgotten' war as a research topic in Russian history. It unearthed a wealth of sources – posters, popular broadsheets, postcards, variety shows, circus acts, cinema, music, operetta and opera – that had been inaccessible or completely forgotten over the Soviet period. Through an analysis of these cultural genres, I argued that the 1917 revolutions did not happen only because of economic and social factors, but also because of the absence of a unifying national identity. In my second book, I broadened the temporal scope of my work by exploring realities and representations of poverty and begging in Russia from the Middle Ages to the present. Combining cultural and social history over the longue durée, this book brings together sources ranging from medieval chronicles and theological tracts to nineteenth-century ethnography and post-Soviet anthropological field work, from poetry, literature, and newspapers, to police records, legal texts, and medical studies. Using 'social imagination' as a conceptual frame, I analyse contrasting perspectives, attitudes, and policies on beggars and the poor, but also illuminate their material living conditions and everyday lives. My current project explores the aesthetic symbolism and the scenarios of Russian imperial power in the South Caucasus in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It effectively combines the cultural history of politics with the history of empire, a field that has become particularly relevant after the collapse of the USSR. By investigating in a vignette-like fashion such diverse phenomena as royal visits, the building and unveiling of monuments, and the opening ceremonies and internal arrangements of museums and exhibitions in one particular geographical region, I am in fact proposing a micro-historical approach to the history of the Russian Empire and hope to contribute to a better understanding of Russia’s imperial history and to current debates about the meaning of the Russian experience in the South Caucasus.