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About Erika Monahan
I am a historian of early modern Russian Empire. My intellectual agenda in a nutshell is to better understand Russia and lands that became part of the Russian Empire in their early modern context. I am also very interested in Environmental history.Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow
NBN Episodes hosted by Erika:
January 24, 2026
Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe
What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the…
January 11, 2026
Mixing Medicines
Clare Griffin's book Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) introduces the reader to the dynamic an…
November 18, 2025
Our Dear Friends in Moscow
1991 ushered in a new epoch of hope as Russia marched toward democracy and prosperity on the ruins of the Soviet Union. In 2025 those hopes for a thri…
June 15, 2025
How Russia Got Big
Paul W. Werth, How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History (Bloomsbury, 2025) “Even people who know little about Russia know that it is big.” Thus Paul…
June 6, 2025
A Measure Short of War
In 2016 the United States was stunned by evidence of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. But it shouldn’t have been. Subversion—domest…
June 6, 2025
Questions: A Discussion with Leslie Butler and Holly Case
BOOKS UNDER DISCUSSION: Leslie Butler, Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford Universit…
June 5, 2025
On Political Economy
• Philip J. Stern, Empire, Incorporated. The Corporations That Built British Colonialism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2023), by. • …
May 18, 2024
Our Enemies Will Vanish
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. …
March 13, 2024
Legal Cultures in the Russian Empire
Law. How does the state form and use it? How do people use and shape it? How does law shape culture? How does the practice of law change over time in …
February 18, 2024
Post-Imperial Possibilities
How can territory and peoples be organized? After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturall…
February 15, 2024
War and Punishment
As soon as the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, prominent independent Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar circulated a Facebook petition signed first b…
December 17, 2023
Animal Spirits
In this interview the distinguished historian Jackson Lears talks about his latest book, Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Me…
December 12, 2023
The Ruling Families of Rus
In the current context, where Vladimir Putin justifies his war against Ukraine by insisting on an inevitable, unbroken teleology that binds Kyiv to Mo…
November 7, 2023
Picturing Russian Empire
Picturing Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2023) appears as Russia’s imperialist war of aggression against Ukraine grinds on. The stakes could not be higher…
November 3, 2023
Empires, States, Corporations
Adam Smith wrote that, “Political economy belongs to no nation; it is of no country: it is the science of the rules for the production, the accumulati…
October 7, 2023
Books in the Early Modern World
If you are reading this, it’s probably hard—nearly impossible—to imagine a world without writing—without print, books, newspapers, signs, graffiti, ad…
September 9, 2023
Red Leviathan
The Soviet Union killed over six hundred thousand whales in the twentieth century, many of them illegally and secretly. That catch helped bring many w…
June 18, 2023
Foreigners in Muscovy
This interview delves into a book that is indebted to the scholarly work with which New Books Network founder, Marshall Poe, began his career: ‘A Peo…
November 24, 2022
Russia and the Dutch Republic, 1566–1725
Once upon a time, it was said that Russia was isolated and ignorant until Peter the Great opened Russia to the West and ushered in modernization. Whil…
September 22, 2022
A Spiritual Revolution
The ideas of the Protestant Reformation, followed by the European Enlightenment, had a profound and long-lasting impact on Russia’s church and society…
August 23, 2022
Information
Information is everywhere. We live in an “Information” Society. We can get more of it faster, quicker, and in more different shapes and sizes than at …
December 28, 2021
Succession to the Throne in Early Modern Russia
The transfer of power is something every must state attend to (and preferably by peaceful means). Remarkably, this fundamental aspect of statecraft wa…