Sean Pollock is an historian of Russian empire. He serves on the board of directors of the Cincinnati-Kharkiv Sister City Partnership and in 2024 co-created and co-taught with faculty from V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University a course titled “War and Society in Ukraine: Collaborative Online International Learning.” He is the author of “Anglophone Historiography of Russian Empire before the Imperial Turn,” Slavic Review (forthcoming); “Pretending to Command: Representations of Prince Petr Bagration in Tolstoy’s War and Peace” (Academica Press, 2026); “Extractivist, Exclusionary, and Exploitative? International Scholarly Cooperation in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies,” (under review); “Alexander Suvorov’s Strange Sitting in Astrakhan, 1780-82” (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, forthcoming); “‘A True Russian Solider’: Fabius Larionovich’s Less-Is-More Art of War,” The Russian Review 83, 2 (2024): 1-5, https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12599; (with Susan Smith-Peters) “How the Field Was Colonized: Russian History’s Ukrainian Blind Spot,” Russian History 50, 3-4 (2023): 145-156, https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340074; (with Susan Smith-Peters et al.) “Periodization as Decolonization,” Russian History 50, 30-4 (2023): 157-183, https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340075; and “‘The Duty of Perfect Obedience’: The Laws of Subjecthood in Tsarist Russia,” 24, 4 (2023): Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 24, 4 (2023): 753-90, https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2023.a910978.
Sean earned a B.A. in International Studies: Russia and Eastern Europe from the University of Washington (advisor: Daniel Clarke Waugh) and an A.M. in Regional Studies: Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University (advisor: Edward L. Keenan). He is the recipient of the Thomas T. Hoppes Prize for Thesis Advising and the Stephen Botein Prize for Excellence in Teaching in History and Literature at Harvard, among other teaching awards.