Sergei Kan was born in Moscow, USSR and studied history at the Moscow State University in 1970-1973. He immigrated to the Unites States in 1974 and completed his B.A. at Boston University (majoring in anthropology and religion) in 1976. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1982, after conducting a year-long ethnographic and archival research on the culture and history of the Tlingit people of Alaska (including their relations with the Russians/Russian Orthodox Church). He taught anthropology at the University of Michigan between 1983 and 1989.
Since 1989, Professor Kan has been teaching anthropology at Dartmouth College where he is also affiliated with the Jewish Studies Program and the Department of East European, Eurasian and Russian Studies. He has edited and authored a dozen academic books, including Symbolic Immortality: Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century (1989; 2nd ed. 2016); Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity Through Two Centuries (1989); Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist (2009); A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country: Vincent Soboleff in Alaska (2013); A Maverick Boasian: the Life and Work of Alexander A. Goldenweiser (2023).
