Monday, July 06, 2026
Joseph Kellner
Joseph Kellner is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Georgia
When did you first develop an interest in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies?
My family descends from the region, but that really played no role in it, and I don’t recall why I first took Russian in college. In classes, I quickly grew to love the language. I was thenfortunate to spend a year abroad with Middlebury in Irkutsk, and from learning the language there, an interest in culture and history and all else followed, expanding in myriad directions for twenty years now.
How have your interests changed since your initial interest in the field?
My interests have followed, most of all, from good colleagues and friends that have blessed my time in graduate school, at my job in Georgia, and in ASEEES. I had not studied history much at all before graduate school. But an enthusiastic teacher or peer can make any topic interesting. From Russia, I’ve taken great interest in the larger former Soviet space and inEastern Europe, and from an initial interest in the twentieth century, it’s been rewarding to explore further and further back in historical time. I don’t expect I’ll ever settle on a single topic of study.
What is your current research/work project?
I am currently compiling a curious sort of source reader with our ASEEES colleague Alexei Golubev, who invited me into the project. We have collected ten outstanding examples of early Soviet, anticolonial historiography of the Russian Empire—that is, Bolshevik historians, revising celebratory imperial histories to re-examine the nature of Russian colonialism across hundreds of years and the entirety of northern Eurasia. To translations of these histories, we have invited current-day scholars (some in ASEEES, though mostly from farther afield) to write commentaries, with free rein to interpret the task as they will. At the moment—May of 2026—I’m also finishing a commentary of my own, which I hope will be published as a sort of preview of the larger project.
What do you value about your ASEEES membership?
ASEEES houses an extraordinary range of experts, and for all the critiques of “area studies,” it has been intellectually rewarding from my earliest years in graduate school to so easily meet and work with scholars outside my focus and my discipline. The panels I’ve contributed to at our annual convention have almost nothing in common, in topic or in personnel. Without ASEEES to gather us, it would be lonely work, socially and intellectually.
Besides your professional work, what other interests and/or hobbies do you enjoy?
I do a lot of woodworking and carpentry, with the long-term goal of building a great Russian/Finnish-style banya for myself. I used to resent that Ethan Pollock wrote a banya book before I could, but perhaps its better that my banya work remains strictly unprofessional.