Faculty and Staff Directory
Michael Khodarkovsky
About
Michael Khodarkovsky (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1987; B.A., Kalmyk State University, Elista, Russia) is a Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches courses in Western civilization, Russian empire, comparative frontiers and colonialism.
Khodarkovsky is an international authority on the history of the Russian frontier and imperial expansion. His first books examined the relationship between the expanding Russian state and its colonial frontier hinterland, notably in Where Two Worlds Met: the Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600 – 1771 (Cornell University Press, 1992) and Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500 – 1800 (Indiana University Press, 2002). He has explored the impact of organized religion and religious conversion in the frontier experience in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Cornell University Press, 2001), which he co-edited with Robert Geraci. His most recent book, Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus (Cornell University Press, 2011), is a history of Russia’s imperial expansion and colonization of the North Caucasus and written in a non-traditional historical genre. Khodarkovsky has most recently 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; the Sorbonne in Paris; University College London, and the universities of Basel and Bern in Switzerland. In April 2012, the Association for the Studies of Nationalities held a special panel on Bitter Choices at Columbia University in New York. He is currently working on two projects which compare the imperial and colonial policies of various nation-states in Eurasia from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, tentatively entitled Imperial Visions, Policies and Impacts: Eurasian Empires in Comparative Perspective, 1500 – 1860s and Between Asiatic and Oriental: Orientalism in Germany and Russia, 1700 – 1917. Khodarkovsky has written more than thirty articles and fifty reviews published in English, French, Russian and German since 1992 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 numerous boards and executive committees, including the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2009 – 2012), the Midwest Consortium of Slavic and European Studies, and the Academic Freedom Press and Brill. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship Program (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), and the American Council of Learned Societies (2001 – 2002). In 2010, Khodarkovsky was named Distinguished Visiting Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.
Research Interests
Early Modern and Imperial Russian History
Courses Taught
- HIST 101: The Evolution of Western Ideas and Institutions to the Seventeenth Century
- HIST 102: The Evolution of the Western Ideas and Institutions since the Seventeenth Century
- HIST 340: Russia Pre—1917: Empire Building
- HIST 341: Soviet History: Between the Revolution, 1917-1991
- HIST 530: Comparative Colonial Empires
- HIST 536: Nationalism in the Soviet Union
Publications
Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus (Cornell University Press, 2011).
Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500 – 1800 (Indiana University Press, 2011).
Where Two Worlds Met: the Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600 – 1771 (Cornell University Press, 1992).
Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, edited with Robert Geraci (Cornell University Press, 2001).