Director

Douglas Northrop

Biographical Sketch | Publications | Curriculum Vitae

Biographical Sketch 

A specialist on the modern history of Central Asia, Douglas Northrop is an associate professor in the Departments of History and Near Eastern Studies and director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan. Educated at Williams College (with degrees in Russian, political science, and mathematics) and then Cambridge University (a starred First in modern European history), he went on to earn his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history at Stanford in 1999, taking a second field in modern Eastern Europe. He did most of his fieldwork in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and in Moscow. He then taught at Pitzer College and the University of Georgia before coming to Michigan in 2004. Northrop served as associate director at U-M's Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies from 2006-08, and was elected to the executive board of the Central Eurasian Studies Society from 2005-08 (co-chairing with Prof. Alexander Knysh the society's national conference, held in Ann Arbor in 2006). He currently sits on the executive board of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.

Northrop is particularly interested in teaching and writing about world history, environmental history, and the cultural aspects of modern colonialism. His scholarship reaches beyond regional and field lines even while focusing on the particular experiences of real people living along the Soviet/Russian frontier. His recent book, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Cornell University Press) investigated Bolshevik attempts to remake and modernize Central Asian society by ending the seclusion of local women. Veiled Empire won both the W. Bruce Lincoln Prize from the AAASS (awarded every two years, for an author's first published monograph or synthesis that is "of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia's past") and the Heldt Prize from AWSS (for the best book in Slavic/Eurasian/East European women's studies). He has received fellowships from the NEH, SSRC, and ACLS, among others, and has published articles in Slavic Review, Russian Review, and elsewhere. He is now editing a new book series for the University of Pittsburgh Press, Central Eurasia in Context: History, Culture, Politics, and is finishing a classroom reader on modern world imperialism. His current research brings together environmental, colonial, cultural, and urban history in telling the story of Soviet empire through the lens of natural disaster--specifically, through a series of major earthquakes that struck the Muslim hinterlands of the tsarist and Soviet empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Selected Publications

Books

Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2004). Winner of 2006 AAASS W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, awarded biennally for an author's first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is "of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia's past." Also winner of AWSS Heldt Prize for best book published in Slavic/Eurasian/East European women's studies.

(Co-authored with Giulietto Chiesa.) Transition to Democracy: Political Change in the Soviet Union, 1987-1991 (University Press of New England, expanded edition 1993). (Published in Russian translation as Perekhod k demokratii [Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1993].)

Articles

"Envisioning Empire: Veils and Visual Revolution in Soviet Central Asia," in Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russia: Essays on Visual Evidence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 162-8.

"The Limits of Liberation: Gender, Revolution, and the Veil in Everyday Life in Soviet Uzbekistan," in Russell Zanca and Jeff Sahadeo, eds., Everyday Life in Central Asia (Indiana University Press, 2007), 89-102.

"Subaltern Dialogues: Subversion and Resistance in Soviet Uzbek Family Law," Slavic Review 60:1 (Spring 2001), 115-39. Revised version published in Lynne Viola, ed., Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Cornell University Press, 2002), 109-38. Winner of Heldt Prize for best article published in Slavic/East European/Eurasian women's studies.

"Nationalizing Backwardness: Gender, Empire, and Uzbek Identity," in Ronald Suny and Terry Martin, eds., State of Nations: The Soviet State and Its Peoples (Oxford University Press, 2001), 191-220. Winner of National Graduate Essay Prize, Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

"Hujum: Unveiling Campaigns and Local Responses, Uzbekistan 1927," in Donald Raleigh, ed., Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-53 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 125-45.

"Languages of Loyalty: Gender, Politics, and Party Supervision in Uzbekistan, 1927-41," Russian Review 59:2 (April 2000), 179-200.