Michael Khodarkovsky

Professor

Khodarkovsky is a historian of the Russian Empire who specializes in the history of the Russian imperial expansion into the Eurasian borderlands.  His books examined the relationship between the expanding Russian state and the non-Christian peoples across the colonial frontier: Where Two Worlds Met: the Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600-1771 (Cornell University Press, 1992), Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Indiana University Press, 2002), and Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus (Cornell University Press, 2011).  He has explored the impact of organized religion, missionary work and religious conversion on Russia's non-Christian population and in a co-edited volume Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Cornell University Press, 2001).

In 2016-18 he took a detour from his traditional interests to explore Russian and Soviet history in 100 vignettes, one for each year of the 20th century. The result was a book, Russia’s 20th century: A Journey in 100 Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). 

His latest book is The Steppe and Its Empires: the Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale University Press, 2026).  It is a broad comparative history of the Eurasian empires that sets side by side the policies and practices of the Russian empire with those of the Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, and Chinese empires between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. 

In the last decade Khodarkovsky has 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; University College London, and the universities of Basel and Bern in Switzerland, Oxford University, Columbia University, Universities of Bamberg, Pittsburgh, UCLA, Amsterdam, Notre Dame, Beijing, Stockholm, Tokyo, Osaka, Hokkaido, Yale, Florence, Rome, Vienna, Georgetown, Freiburg, and Munster. Khodarkovsky has written over forty articles and essays and thirty reviews published in English, French, Russian and German 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 various boards and executive committees, including the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2009-2012).  He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship Program for Turkey (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). 

He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago (2002-03, 2010), Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany (2011), University of Regensburg, Germany (2018), University of Hokkaido, Sapporo, Japan (2022), and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany (2010-11).

Research Interests

Imperial and Modern Russia, Imperial Borderlands, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Non-Russian peoples of Russia, Eurasia, Ottoman empire, Comparative Empires and Colonialisms, and Russian Orientalism.

Specialty Area

Russian History

Courses Taught

• HIST 102: The Evolution of the Western Ideas and Institutions since the Seventeenth Century

• HIST 340: Russia Pre-1917: Empire Building

• HIST 530:  Comparative Colonial Empires

• HIST 536: Nationalisms in Russia

Publications/Research Listings

The Steppe and Its Empires: the Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale University Press, 2026).

Russia’s 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

“Between Europe and Asia: Russia’s State Colonialism in Comparative Perspective, 1550s-1900s” in Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 52, no. 1 (2018), pp. 1-29.

Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus (Cornell University Press, 2011; Russian translation, 2016).

Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Indiana University Press, 2002; Polish translation, 2009; Russian translation, 2019).

Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, edited with Robert Geraci (Cornell University Press, 2001).

Where Two Worlds Met: the Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600-1771 (Cornell University Press, 1992).