Faculty and Staff
Eugene Avrutin
Eugene Avrutin received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2004. Before coming to the University of Illinois, he taught at Colby College. Professor Avrutin is completing his first monograph, A Legible People: Identification Politics and Jewish Accommodation in Imperial Russia. A Legible People is a cultural history that examines the ways in which ordinary Jews accommodated to imperial management policies and redefined themselves (their perceptions, attitudes, and sense of self), against the backdrop of profound economic and social change. This is also a political history that focuses on Russian empire-building and statecraft, that is, the politics practices by which the state attempted to document, verify, and control the movement and place of Jewish (and other imperial) identities. This study takes as its point of departure a shift in the way states identified their populations. If in the early modern period dress and badges represented social and religious identities, then in the modern period states made their populations “legible” by universal means of registration, through censuses, passports, and parish registers.
His teaching and research interests include: governance, assimilation, race/racism; empire/imperialism, autobiography, Russian-Jewish relations, history of anthropology, and everyday life. His articles have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Ab Imperio, Slavic Review, Jewish Social Studies, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.