Bruce Grant

Bruce Grant is Professor of Anthropology at New York University. A specialist on cultural politics in the former Soviet Union, he has done fieldwork in both Siberia and the Caucasus. He is author of In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas (Princeton UP, 1995), a study of the Sovietization of an indigenous people on the Russian Pacific coast, and winner of the Prize for Best First Book from the American Ethnological Society; as well as The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell UP, 2009), on the making of the Caucasus in the Russian popular imagination. He was co-editor of Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area (LIT, 2007) and The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke UP, 2010). His recent research has explored rural Muslim shrines as sites of the retelling of Soviet history in Azerbaijan, as well as reflections on the spectacular rebuilding of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. For the Guggenheim year ahead, he is at work on a historical project on the early twentieth-century, pan-Caucasus journal Molla Nasreddin (1905–1931) as an idiom for rethinking contemporary Eurasian space and authoritarian rule within it. He is a recent past president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, interdisciplinary wing of the American Anthropological Association; and ASEEES, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.