Biography

Eugene M. Avrutin is Assistant Professor of modern European Jewish history and Tobor family scholar in the Program of Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Illinois. His recently completed book manuscript, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. Avrutin has published articles on documentation practices; the concept of race; and religious toleration and neighborly coexistence in the East European borderlands. Together with Harriet Murav (Professor of Slavic Literatures at the University of Illinois) and Petersburg Judaica (a Jewish Studies institute affiliated with the European University in St. Petersburg), he edited Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions (Brandeis University Press, 2009), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the visual arts category. He is also editing (with Robert H. Greene, Professor of Russian history at the University of Montana) a critical edition of the memoirs of the educator and feminist Anna Vygodskaia. Focusing on the Baltic provinces, Avrutin has recently begun a long-term research project on everyday Jewish neighborly relations in the nineteenth century. His research has been supported by IREX, SSRC, Fulbright IIE, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Publications