Jim Meyer's Borderlands

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

With each passing month, it seems like events are forcing us to live under either a portrait of courage or one of cowardice. The people visiting Alexei Navalny's grave to mark the second anniversary of his murder are an example of the former.

We can all learn something from them.

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I am an historian of Russia and the Turkic World, with over 30 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former USSR. My books focus upon Turkic-Russian connections, particularly with regard to people who cross borders. At MSU I typically teach two classes per semester on topics relating to Turkey, the Balkans, the Middle East, and former Soviet space.

My first impressions of the regions I work on came when I was working as an English teacher in Istanbul from 1992-1999. During these years I traveled extensively in the Balkans, Turkey, the former USSR, the Middle East and Asia, and studied Russian and Hungarian in addition to Turkish before returning to the US to pursue a graduate education.

After receiving an MA from Princeton (2001) and a PhD from Brown (2007), I held research fellowships with the NEH/American Research Institute in Turkey, the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. Altogether, I've spent almost ten years of my life in Turkey, and about four years in the former USSR. I've researched extensively in archives and libraries in the Volga-Ural region, the Crimea, and the southern Caucasus, in addition to Istanbul, St. Petersburg, and Moscow.

Since August of 2009 I have been a professor of Islamic World History at Montana State University in the cool little ski town of Bozeman, MT, holding the rank of full professor since July, 2024. My first book, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, was published by Oxford University Press in November of 2014. A paperback version of Turks Across Empires came out in July, 2019, and a Turkish translation of the book was published in 2021.

I spent the 2016-2017 academic year in Moscow through the support of a Fulbright research scholar grant. This research, along with a follow-up trip to Moscow during the summer of 2019, led to the development of my new book, Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation which was published in March of 2023. A paperback version of this book came out in July of 2025.

Review Excerpts for Red Star over the Black Sea

"James H. Meyer has written a beautiful book…Thoroughly grounded in multi-country archival research, this book reevaluates the impact of Hikmet and his comrades and offers a fresh approach to writing a transnational history… intelligent and expertly crafted." Vladimir Hamed- Troyansky, Russian Review, 82 (4), October, 2023, pp. 754-755

"Beautifully written… Meyer’s meticulously researched book offers the most comprehensive biography of Nâzım Hikmet to date and fills an important gap in the existing literature.” Erdem Sönmez, Middle Eastern Studies, April, 2024, Vol. 60, no: 4, pp. 679-680.

Red Star over the Black Sea in podcasts and other media

Discussion about Red Star over the Black Sea on Turkey Book Talk podcast with William Armstrong.

Red Star over the Black Sea on the New Books Network podcast with Reuben Silverman.

Red Star over the Black Sea book talk (in English) at Bosphorus University's Nâzım Hikmet Kültür ve Sanat Araştırma Merkezi.

Panel discussion about Red Star over the Black Sea with the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.

Online lecture on Red Star over the Black Sea for the Anglo-Turkish Society.

Discussion of Red Star over the Black Sea at the Belgrade (Montana) Community Library.

Red Star over the Black Sea featured in Flamman (in Swedish)

Red Star over the Black Sea on Andruck - Deutschlandfunk (in German).

Review Excerpts for Turks Across Empires

"path-breaking...Meyer demonstrates brilliantly the shifts in articulation of cultural and political identities as well as change of the specific vocabulary in the written texts of the Turkic intellectuals."--Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas

"Meyer's book is a page-turner, admittedly not a common trait in scholarly history works. It frequently turns into a sort of amusement park for historians, where the author parades so many newly unearthed, rich in detail, and immensely informative archival documents...finely tackles somewhat delicate yet thorny matters such as Turkism, Pan-Turkism, Ottomanism, and Islamism, as well as addresses the lives of humans who were doomed and perished or sometimes enriched and saved by those very same matters." --American Historical Review

"Meyer leaves us convinced that discourses and claims of identity need to be understood in relation to concrete power configurations and resulting opportunities, and not as articulations of perennial or even would-be nationhood." -- Russian Review

"James Meyer's Turks across Empires is a very valuable and intriguing reassessment of the origins of pan-Turkism through an in-depth examination of some of its leading figures...a great pleasure to read...Meyer's book is 'revisionist' in the sense that it successfully challenges many assumptions and arguments in the study of Russia's Muslims and pan-Turkism...provides a more complete, flesh-and-bone biographical reconstruction of these intellectuals and their milieu...the depiction of Kazan Tatars as 'insider Muslims' of Tsarist Russia is simply brilliant."--Turkish Review

"[Turks Across Empires] presents a wealth of information drawn from archives, periodical publications, memoirs, and other documentary evidence in the languages needed for such a study: Ottoman, Russian, Tatar, and the Turkic of Azerbaijan... As a result, Meyer’s narrative fills in gaps and makes connections that nicely complement the steadily expanding literature on the late Ottoman/late Romanov period and the Turks who shaped their own and wider Turkic identities in that era. By extension, the identity question has profound implications for twentieth and even twenty-first century intellectual and political trajectories."--Review of Middle East Studies

"Based on an impressive array of sources from Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan, James Meyer’s monograph not only expands the knowledge about the Muslims of Russia but also provides a widely applicable argument about instrumentalization of identity in different political contexts." --Council for European Studies

"James Meyer pursues an imaginative approach to the final decades of the Russian and Ottoman Empires by focusing on the biographies of three activists—a Crimean Tatar, an Azerbaijani, and a Volga Tatar—who, while born in Russia, were men with substantial interest and experi- ence traveling to and living in the empire’s southern neighbor. Biography becomes, thus, the modus operandi for unraveling the roles of these and similar men—“trans-imperial people,” as Meyer calls them—in propagating pan-Turkism and suggesting it as a new identity for Turks, who were also overwhelmingly Muslim, everywhere."--Slavic Review

"A major contribution of this work is its use of original source material in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish and Russian. Using personal correspondence and Ottoman and Russian tsarist era archives, Meyer traces four distinct periods to their trans-imperial existence moving back and forth between Istanbul, Kazan, Crimea, and Azerbaijan...an important contribution in several ways."--Turkish Area Studies Review

"…the book does a very good job in bringing the complexities of Russia’s Muslim intellectual life of the late imperial period close to a readership broadly interested in the modernization of Russia’s peripheries and in Russian-Ottoman relations… Meyer convincingly demonstrates that since the 1870s Muslim communities in inner Russia perceived the state as a threat, especially in view of the administrative attempts at taking control over Muslim schools."--Journal of World History

"...impressive...James Meyer’s book is a collective biography of the most prominent pan-Turkists—Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935), Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869–1939), and İsmail Gasprinskii (1851–1914)—by means of which the author reveals the patterns of migration from the Middle Volga, Southeast Caucasus, and Crimea to the Ottoman lands and back, as well as local politics in each protagonist’s original region…The fruit of this admirable exercise is most visible when Meyer demonstrates the simultaneous formation of population policy on both the Russian and Ottoman shores of the Black Sea."--Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

"Few Ottomanists understand the complexities of the situation of Muslims in the Russian Empire, while scholars of the Russian Empire have tended to imagine the Ottoman Empire only in broad brushstrokes. Meyer is one of a small new crop of scholars who possess the requisite skills…The narrative is richly documented and thick—perhaps the best account of Volga–Ural public life in English…" --International Journal of Middle East Studies

"Le projet est particulièrement ambitieux et l’ouvrage est très riche, reposant sur des sources en plusieurs langues...Meyer offre une contribution très importante à l’étude des conflits, des tensions et des dissensions au sein même du monde musulman de l’Empire russe, dans la région de la Volga, entre le clergé institutionnalisé des Assemblées spirituelles et de nouvelles élites intellectuelles ou marchandes qui tentent de s’octroyer, au gré des soubresauts de la vie politique, un espace grandissant de liberté."--Bulletin des Annales Islamologiques

"Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities".--Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Turks Across Empires is deeply-researched, drawing on sources in Russian and multiple Turkic languages from no fewer than thirteen archives in the former Soviet Union and Turkey. This research is showcased beautifully in chapter one (‘Trans-Imperial People’), which is a superb, groundbreaking introduction to the large demographic of Muslims who — like Akcura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu — moved between the Russian and Ottoman Empires"--Slavonic and East European Review

Jim Meyer's Borderlands

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Turks Across Empires

Turks Across Empires in Turkish

Turks Across Empires in podcasts and other media

Reviews of Turks Across Empires

Review Excerpts for Turks Across Empires

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