Ronald Grigor Suny

Ronald Grigor Suny
Born	25 September 1940  (age 80)
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship (1983) Berlin Prize (2014)

Ronald Grigor Suny (born September 25, 1940^[1]) is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and served as director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, 2009 to 2012 ^[2] and was the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan 2005 to 2015, and is Emeritus Professor of political science and history at the University of Chicago. He was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan, after beginning his career as an assistant professor at Oberlin College. He was a 2013 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Life[]

Suny was born in Philadelphia, graduated from Swarthmore College in 1962, and earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1968. His fields of study are the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia; nationalism; ethnic conflict; the role of emotions in politics; South Caucasus; and Russian/Soviet historiography.^[3]

He is a grandson of the Armenian composer Grikor Mirzaian Suni. Along with a Turkish colleague, Fatma Müge Göçek, and others, he organized and led the Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS), which in a series of ten conferences from 2000 to 2017 brought Armenian, Turkish, Kurdish, and other scholars together to investigate the Armenian genocide of 1915.

Selected publications[]

• The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972);
• Armenia in the Twentieth Century (Scholars Press, 1983);
• The Making of the Georgian Nation (Indiana University Press, 1988, 1994);
• Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press, 1993);
• The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 1993);
• The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford University Press, 1998, 2011).
• "Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations," The Journal of Modern History Vol. 73, No. 4, December 2001
• "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
• The Hamidian Massacres, 1894-1897: Disinterring a Buried History. Études arméniennes contemporaines, 11, 125-134. 2018.
• Red Flag Unfurled: Historians, the Russian Revolution, and the Soviet Experience (Verso Books, 2017).
• Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment (Verso Books, 2020).
• Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Co-author

• with Valerie A. Kivelson, Russia's Empires (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Editor[]

• Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983; University of Michigan Press, 1996) and
• The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents (Oxford University Press, 2003, 2013);
• The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 3: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Coeditor[]

• Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Indiana University Press, 1989);
• The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory: Visions and Revisions (D. C. Heath, 1990);
• Making Workers Soviet: Power, Culture, and Identity (Cornell University Press, 1994);
• Becoming National (Oxford University Press, 1996);
• Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation (University of Michigan Press, 1999);
• A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2001).

References[]

External links[]

• Faculty page at University of Chicago
• University of Michigan Faculty Page