Research Interests

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

In 2020, Cornell University Press published his first book, Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and The Armenians, 1801-1914. This study 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.

Dr. Riegg’s current book project, “Westerners in the Tsar’s East: European Lives in Imperial Russia’s Caucasus,” analyzes the lives of the Western European expatriates who lived in the Caucasus from Russia’s first annexation in that region in 1801 to the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. To deepen our understanding of tsarist repertoires of rule, this work examines often-conflicting Russian perceptions of “foreign” and “Western” life in what the state portrayed as its most prized “Eastern” borderland. A cross-cultural and cross-border narrative, this study portrays Russian imperialism as a multifaceted process of global encounters that transcended not only political but also ethnocultural boundaries.

His research has appeared in the journals The Russian Review, Ab Imperio, and Nationalities Papers. The Fulbright-Hays program, American Councils for International Education, Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, American Research Institute of the South Caucasus, and the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund have supported Dr. Riegg’s work. During 2020-23, Dr. Riegg is a Texas A&M Arts & Humanities Fellow.