Erik R. Scott

Associate Professor (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley; B.A. Brown University). Modern Russia and the Soviet Union; Modern Europe; Caucasus and Central Asia; Migration and diaspora; Comparative empires; Trade and organized crime.

My research explores mobility, diaspora, and exchange within the imperial borders of Russia and Eurasia as well as in a broader global context. My book Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora in the Soviet Union, which looks at the USSR not simply as a Russian empire, but as an "empire of diasporas," where politics, culture, and economics were defined by the mixing of a diverse array of mobile nationalities, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. Following the history of Georgians beyond the Georgian republic from 1917 to the present, my book examines the evolution of the Soviet multiethnic empire from the perspective of its most prominent internal diaspora.