2026 Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Fellows Announced

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, nomadic polities across the Eurasian steppe came under the control of the sedentary Qing and Romanov empires. Though this is usually ascribed to superior technology and modern social organization, the role of nomadic elites in this process is usually neglected. My dissertation analyzes Kazakh responses to Russian and Manchu imperialism, including attempts by Kazakh khans to consolidate their authority using imperial benefits. However, I reveal the effects of imperial expansion beyond the lives of male elites by shifting readers’ focus to the steppe’s most vulnerable inhabitants: enslaved women. I chronicle a forgotten trade in Oirat (Kalmyk and Zunghar) captives between Russia and the Kazakh steppe that was made possible by the Qing conquest of Zungharia and the Russian colonization of Kalmykia. My dissertation tells a story of mobility, connectivity, and exchange on the 18th and 19th century steppe through the eyes of enslaved Oirat women who maneuvered between different social statuses, economic systems, and religions (Tibetan Buddhism, Sunni Islam, and Orthodox Christianity). I also analyze the economic and demographic changes in Kazakh and Russian society resulting from the trade in Oirat captives and the important political role of enslaved Oirats in Kazakh society. 

My dissertation examines the development and expansion of Soviet Korean diasporic networks across the Soviet Union from the 1920s through the mid-1950s, challenging the predominant focus on Stalin’s deportation of Koreans from the Russian Far East to Central Asia in 1937 as the defining moment of Soviet Korean history. Soviet Koreans were not merely victims of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing, relegated to the sidelines. Through institutions such as the community organization Koryŏinhoe, Korean kolkhozes, theater, and newspapers, Soviet Koreans created their own public culture and expanded their networks, which continued to serve their interests even after the deportation. By investigating these institutions together for the first time, I demonstrate how Soviet Koreans strategically navigated official structures while renegotiating their relationship to Soviet socialism, Korean nationalism, and anti-colonial struggle. Drawing on extensive archival materials from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Russia, and South Korea, my dissertation shows how Soviet Koreans harnessed the political, social, and cultural forms sanctioned by the Soviet state to advance their interests across Eurasia. 

My dissertation recuperates the history of Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) in Central Asia by showing how their labor shaped local memories on multiple scales. After WWII, nearly 600,000 Japanese POWs were sent to gulags across the Soviet Union, with approximately 100,000 sent to Central Asia. Their histories have largely been forgotten, yet physical buildings, urban sites, and other material infrastructures still bear the imprints of their labor. By focusing on everyday encounters through labor, care, exchange, and commemoration, my dissertation investigates how interpersonal relationships complicate state-centered narratives of Soviet forced labor and violence. Rather than treating Japanese POWs solely as victims of Stalinist repression, I examine how local residents remember them as neighbors, workers, and, at times, objects of sympathy and care, and how these memories emerge from lived encounters that challenge state-centered narratives of Soviet violence. Part I situates Japanese POW labor within Stalinist labor regimes, analyzing their roles in postwar construction projects and their interactions with local communities, many of whom also endured Soviet repression. Part II explores how these experiences are remembered in the post-Soviet era, focusing on material remnants as sites of memory that mediate local interpretations of the Soviet past. 

This dissertation, set in Ukraine during the revolutionary events of 1917, focuses on the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (UPSR), the largest political party in 1917 Ukraine, and the soviets of workers’, soldiers’, and peasants’ deputies. The soviets were deliberative councils and acted as sites of contention over power in 1917. The UPSR, by virtue of its size and ubiquitous involvement in the activity of the soviets, posed the biggest obstacle to Bolshevik aspirations for power in revolutionary Ukraine. The notion of “soviet power” – the idea that these bodies should wield state authority – was a famous rallying cry, almost entirely associated with the Bolsheviks. But the UPSR also had a plan for a form of soviet power by late 1917. Soviets were a symbol of the revolution that was molded into the service of the Bolshevik party and its nascent state, Soviet Russia, which was itself, not incidentally, also named after these bodies. But the world of the soviets in 1917 Ukraine was far from Bolshevik-controlled. 

“Empire by Credit” reconstructs how, over the decades following the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1772, 1793, 1795), the Russian Empire established a pervasive form of economic governance over the wealthiest and most powerful Polish-Lithuanian noble families by assuming the role of creditor, arbiter, and guarantor of their vast private debts. In 1793, amid financial collapse, several magnates defaulted on their payments, and Empress Catherine II and her successors intervened, promising to compensate domestic and international creditors. Seeking to consolidate Polish-Lithuanian nobles’ allegiance to the empire, the Russian state began servicing the debts of prominent families such as the Radziwiłł, Potocki, and Lubomirski, and established debt commissions to adjudicate several hundred legal claims against them. In exchange, state officials extracted assets in the form of cash, land, people, and privately-owned towns. Polish-Lithuanian nobles faced payment deadlines, negotiated debt restructuring, and navigated a new legal framework regulating loans issued by state banking institutions. Until the radical transformation of the legal and political order following the January Uprising of 1863, this form of governance expanded imperial jurisdiction over land and people and accelerated the transfer of property from the Polish-Lithuanian nobility to the Russian imperial state.