Overview
I am a cultural-intellectual historian whose research focuses on terror/ism and revolutionary movements in modern Russia, Europe and, most recently, the U.S. More broadly, my interests include philosophy, literature and the arts, law, political thought, and historical method.
My book, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Cornell UP, 2009), is a microhistory of the first attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1866. I have also written a series of shorter texts on the temporality of terrorism, and I am the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism (Oxford UP, 2022), a volume whose purpose it is to reevaluate the emergence and development of terrorism around the globe from the ancient world to the present day.
Currently, I am at work on a history of the 1969 Manson murders.
Recent courses taught include: History of Terrorism, History of Law: Great Trials (with Paul Friedland), Thinking about History with the Manson Murders and, at the graduate level, Modernity and Modernism: East and West, History of Time/Time of History, Radicalism: Intellectual History of the European Left (1848-1917), and Key Texts in European Intellectual History.
Publications
- Books:
- The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism. Cornell, 2009. Paperback 2011.
- The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism, eds. Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
- Kinship, Community, and Self: Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean, eds. Jason Coy, Jared Poley, Benjamin Marschke, and Claudia Verhoeven. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014.
- Articles & Anthology Chapters:
- “Epilogue: Shock and Awe, Terrorism and Theory,” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism, eds. Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Online publication January 2021 at https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858569.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199858569-e-42
- “’Now Is the Time for Helter Skelter’: Terror, Temporality, and the Manson Family.” Time and Power. Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History, eds. Stefanos Geroulanos, Dan Edelstein, and Natasha Wheatley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020.
- “Time Bombs: Terrorism as a Political Modernism in Russia and Europe,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism, eds. Carola Dietze and Claudia Verhoeven. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Online publication August 2020 at https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858569.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199858569-e-011
- “Rethinking Revolution: Radicalism at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century,” The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, Vol. I, eds. Peter Gordon and Warren Breckman. Cambridge, 2019.
- “’Une Révolution Vraiment Scientifique’: Russian Revolutionary Terrorism, the Escape from the European Orbit, and the Invention of a New Revolutionary Paradigm,” Scripting Revolution, eds. Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein. Stanford/Surhkamp, 2015.
- “Adventures in Terrorism: Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinsky and the Literary Lives of the Russian Revolutionary Community, 1860s-1880s,” Community, Kinship, and Self: Essays in Honor of David Warren Sabean, eds. Jason Coy, Jared Poley, Benjamin Marschke, and Claudia Verhoeven. Berghahn Books, 2014.
- “Wormholes in Russian History: Events ‘Outside of Time’ (Featuring Malevich, Morozov, and Mayakovsky),” Breaking Up Time: Settling the Borders between the Present, the Past and the Future, ed. Christ Lorenz and Berber Bevernage. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013.
- “Oh, Times, There is No Time (But the Time that Remains): The Terrorist in Russian Literature, 1863-1913,” Terrorism and Narrative Practice, eds. Thomas Austenfeld, Dimiter Daphinoff, Jens. Munster: LIT Verlag, 2011.
- “Time of Terror, Terror of Time: On the Impatience of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism.” Special Issue of Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas: “Terrorism in Imperial Russia: New Perspectives.” 58 (2010): 2, pp. 254-273.
- “Crime and Punishment Draws the Line,” in Blooms Literary Themes: Civil Disobedience, ed. Harold Bloom and Blake Hobby. Chelsea House, 2010.
- “Court Files,” in Reading Primary Sources. The Interpretation of Texts from 19th and 20th Century History, ed. Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann. Routledge, 2008.
- “The Making of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism,” in Enemies of Humanity: The Nineteenth-Century War on Terrorism, ed. Isaac Land. Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008.
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