I am an historian of Russia and the Middle East, focusing especially upon incidences of Russian-Turkic contact. My work mainly uses sources written in Russian, Ottoman Turkish, and the Turkic
languages of the former USSR to look at issues like human mobility, communication, politics, and cross-cultural interactions in late imperial Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. A resident of
Istanbul from 1992 to 1999, I completed an MA from Princeton in 2001 and a PhD from Brown in 2007. Since August of 2009 I've been an assistant professor of History at Montana State University.