2115 Francis Scott Key
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
phone: 301-405-4281
fax: 301-314-9399
Email: dolbilov@umd.edu

           A historian of imperial Russia, Mikhail Dolbilov is mostly interested in the tsarist bureaucracy’s mentality and statecraft; interconnections between state reforms and symbolic representations of the Russian autocracy; and ethnic and confessional politics on the empire’s western periphery in the age of rising nationalism. Along with Aleksei Miller, he has published the Russian-language volume The Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire (2006). He is author of a range of articles, both in Russian and English, that address complex issues of the Russo-Polish rivalry in a broader imperial context and argue that the rule over these borderlands was an essential part of how the empire functioned as a whole. In his forthcoming Russian Land, Foreign Faith: Ethno-religious Policy of Empire in Lithuania and Belarus under Alexander II (in Russian), Dolbilov focuses on the imperial dialectics of religious tolerance and discrimination against non-Orthodox faiths (as practiced towards Roman Catholics and Jews) during the era of the Great Reforms, detecting the impact that nationalist sensibilities had on earlier Enlightenment-born disciplining patterns of the state’s confessional engineering. Dolbilov serves on the editorial board of the Historia Rossica series of the Moscow publisher Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Observer), committed to fostering provocative revisions of the field of Russian history and, particularly, translating into Russian recent innovative works by Western Russianists. He has taught at the European University in St. Petersburg (2006-2009) and has been a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University and the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University (Japan).

Return to Faculty Listing

Current Projects: