My book Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia was published by Bloomsbury in June 2021.  You can read the introduction of the book via this preview.

Esperanto is a constructed language that was designed by L. L. Zamenhof (1859-1917), a Jewish eye doctor who was born and raised in the western borderlands of late imperial Russia.  Launched in 1887 from Warsaw, Esperanto means “one who hopes.”  It was Zamenhof’s hope that an international auxiliary language would allow the world’s peoples—then frightfully fractured by ethnic, linguistic, religious, and class divisions—a linguistic means through which they could communicate and cooperate internationally. 

Ordinary men and women in Russia and all over the world soon transformed Esperanto into a global movement. Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia traces the history and legacy of this effort: from Esperanto’s roots in the social turmoil of the pre-revolutionary Pale of Settlement; to its appeal among the globally minded in late imperial Russia; to its links to interwar socialist internationalism and Comintern bids for world revolution; and, finally, to the demise of the Soviet Esperanto movement in the increasingly xenophobic Stalinist 1930s. In doing so, this book reveals how Esperanto – and global language politics more broadly – shaped late imperial and early Soviet Russia. It also helps us to better understand the ambiguous premium placed on foreign languages and the often precarious position of their speakers in the larger history of Soviet internationalism.

New Soviet Gypsies

In 2013, I published my first book, New Soviet Gypsies:  Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood, with The University of Toronto Press.

New Soviet Gypsies provides a unique history of Roma, an understudied and often misunderstood diasporic people, by exploring their social and political lives in the early Soviet Union.  The book is focused on the Soviet mission to transform so-called “backward Gypsies” into New Soviet Men and Women through a range of nation-building projects. 

The Bolsheviks promised to “uplift” and “advance” the Soviet Union’s ethnic minorities via a nationality policy that would liberate them from the “backwardness” to which tsarist rule had ostensibly condemned them.  Roma and their fellow “backward” ethnic minorities in the early Soviet Union were promised preferential access to jobs and education, but also the creation of national languages, literatures, theaters, native-language schools, and territories (within the USSR).  In the Bolsheviks’ famous slogan, these were all to be “national in form, socialist in content.”  In other words, this nationality policy was designed to integrate the Soviet Union’s ethnic minorities into the modern socialist economy and new Soviet culture by means of institutionalized ethnic particularism.

Regardless of their intentions or sincerity, Roma engaged Bolshevik nationality policy.  They participated in the Soviet civilizing mission and thereby transformed themselves into citizens. I argue that Roma proved the primary agents of their own assimilation of Soviet culture and integration into the socialist economy.  Yet I understand Roma’s Soviet self-fashioning as having been variously motivated within a system built on the foundations of both ruthless coercion and exultant visions of a liberating socialist future. 

Based on extensive research in the archives of the former USSR, my book is thus a study of how minority peoples creatively mobilized Bolshevik nationality policy.  It is also a methodological intervention that draws from subjectivity studies to redirect our attention to the agency of Soviet citizens.  New Soviet Gypsies is also a significant contribution to the growing subfield of Romani Studies.  It provides needed understanding of Roma and the diversity of their histories and cultures.