Current Research

“Excavating Empire”:

I am working on a manuscript that analyzes how tsarist Russia’s archeologists constructed an “imperial imaginary”; by this I mean, how they generated a set of values and symbols that allowed subjects of the Russian tsar to recognize themselves as members of a multi-national, multi-confessional empire whose roots stretched back not just centuries, but millennia. The 19^th century was marked politically by the rise of nationalism, spearheaded by Western European states who declared the nation-state to be the epitome of modernity. Russian archeologists argued against what they considered

a pervasive eurocentrism in theorizing about national identities, and I hypothesize that they created a space in which nations co-existed contentedly within empires. Archeology, one of the 19^th-century’s emergent “knowledge professions,” played a pivotal role. Participants in the century’s epistemological shift away from text to material artefact as the primary unit of analysis, archeologists pushed forward the evolution of modern social sciences: that is, they offered new approaches to the study of societies, purportedly more accurate because their work derived from empirical data rather than from philosophical evidence.