My name is Sergey. I am a historian of slavery in Imperial Russia and the Caucasus and a lecturer in the Department of History at UC Santa Barbara. In addition, I hold the position of a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies at UC Santa Barbara during the 2023-2024 academic year. I am keenly interested in the questions of religion, religious conversion, and the performance of religious identity; the relationship between the state and subaltern groups; and the role of gender in the imperial peripheries.  

My expertise lay in the history of the Caucasus in the nineteenth century. My scholarship conceptualizes the Caucasus as a permanent borderland, a site of cultural exchanges, transnational commercial networks, contested memory, and imperial rivalries. My book manuscript, Reluctant Abolitionists, investigates the history of slavery, the slave trade, and abolition in the Caucasus under Russian imperial rule. When completed, it will provide the first comprehensive account of how slavery was abolished in the Caucasus and be in conversation with a global history of abolitionism.

Thank you for visiting my website! I am happy to answer inquiries about my current research projects and discuss proposals for collaboration.