Research Interests

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

His award-winning book, Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and The Armenians, 1801-1914, 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.

Prof. Riegg’s current book project reconsiders the story of Romanov imperialism in the Caucasus by uncovering Russia’s trial-and-error strategy of transplanting or tolerating the settlement of Western European communities in its strategically vital borderlands. The protagonists include Scottish missionaries, French entrepreneurs, German schismatics, British speculators, Swiss evangelicals, and the Russian bureaucrats who monitored them. This study examines the often-conflicting Russian perceptions of “foreign” and “Western” life in what the state portrayed as its most prized “Eastern” periphery.

His research has appeared in the journals The Russian Review, Ab Imperio, Nationalities Papers, and Cahiers du Monde russe. During 2020-23, Dr. Riegg is a Texas A&M Arts & Humanities Fellow.