Stephen Badalyan Riegg

Research Interests

Dr. Stephen Badalyan Riegg’s research and teaching interests revolve around the histories of Modern Europe, Imperial Russia, and the Caucasus.

His award-winning book, Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and The Armenians, 1801-1914, traces the relationship between the Romanov state and the Armenian diaspora that populated Russia’s territorial fringes and navigated the tsarist empire’s metropolitan centers. Analyzing the complexities of this imperial encounter—beyond the reductive question of whether Russia was a friend or foe to Armenians—allows us to study the methods of tsarist imperialism in the context of diasporic distribution, inter-imperial conflict and alliance, nationalism, and religious and economic identity.

Currently Dr. Riegg is working on a project that reconsiders the story of Romanov imperialism in the Caucasus by uncovering Russia’s trial-and-error strategy of transplanting or tolerating the settlement of Western European communities in its strategically vital borderlands. The protagonists include Scottish missionaries, French silk barons, German schismatics, Swiss evangelicals, and the Russian bureaucrats who monitored them.

Areas of Speciality

• Imperial Russia
• European Empires
• Caucasus