Bruce Grant

Professor of Anthropology; Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D. 1993, Rice University; B.A. 1985, McGill University.

Office Address: 25 Waverly Place New York, NY 10003
Email:
Phone: 212-998-3810
Fax: 212-995-4014

Areas of Research/Interest

Former Soviet Union, Siberia, the Caucasus; cultural history and politics; religion.

Associated with other departments or programs

NYU Department of Russian and Slavic Studies
NYU Center for Near Eastern Studies

External Affiliations

Immediate Past-President, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2012)
Vice-Chair, National Council for East European and Eurasian Research
Board of Trustees, Association of Members of the Institute for Advanced Study

Publications

We Are All Eurasian, NewsNet: Bulletin of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 52 (1): 1-6.

Recognizing Soviet Culture, in Reconstructing the House of Culture, Joachim Otto Habeck and Brian Donahoe, eds. New York: Berghahn Press, pp. 263-276.

Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Azerbaijan, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 3 (2011): 654-681.

Cosmopolitan Baku. Ethnos 75, no. 2 (2010): 123-147.

[Editor] The Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics [with Adele Barker]. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.



The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

*Honorable Mention for the Harvard Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies



[Editor] Caucasus Paradigms: Anthropologies, Histories, and the Making of a World Area [with Lale Yalçın-Heckmann]. Berlin: LIT, 2007.



The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains. Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2005): 39-67.



"An Average Azeri Village" (1930). Slavic Review 63, no. 4 (2004): 705-731.



New Moscow Monuments, or, States of Innocence. American Ethnologist 28, no. 2 (2001): 332-362.



[Editor] The Social Organization of the Gilyak, by Lev Shternberg. New York and Seattle: American Museum of Natural History and the University of Washington Press, 1999.



[Editor] Neotraditionalism in the Russian North: Indigenous Peoples and the Legacy of Perestroika, by Aleksandr Pika. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.



In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
*Winner of the Prize for Best First Book awarded by the American Ethnological Society, 1996.




Current News / Projects


Updated July 2011



Following the release of The Captive and the Gift, a study of competing logics of sovereignty in the Caucasus region, and an edited volume, The Russia Reader, I am at work on a handful of projects:



• an ongoing study of the history of Sovietization of one community in northwest Azerbaijan, with particular regard for its rich social life around rural religious shrines;



• a study of changing social mores in the rapidly transforming capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, from model socialist urban centre to nationalizing metropolis; and



• a new project on the role of satire in authoritarian settings as seen through the life and work of Celil Memmedquluzade, editor of the Azeri-language, Tbilisi-based, multi-regional journal, Molla Nesreddin, which was published from 1906-1931.


 
I am currently serving as President of ASEEES, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (formerly the AAASS), where our current goals have been to internationalize the profile of the organization and to widen our membership through greater inclusion of work being done across greater Eurasian space.



At NYU, I am teaching three courses in 2011-2012: a graduate seminar on the State, an introductory course in ethnography, and a Freshman Honors Seminar on nationalism.

In addition to serving as the Director of Graduate Studies in Anthropology, I have been teaching with NYU’s Presidential Scholars Program,  and serving on the Graduate Curriculum Committee of the university, the Freshman Dialogues Committee, the Fulbright Committee, and the Foundations of Contemporary Cultures Steering Committee.