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Willard Sunderland

Associate Professor; Department Head
Center for Area Studies and Programs - Affiliate Faculty
History - Tenure-Track Faculty
353A McMicken Hall
513-556-2146
willard.sunderland@uc.edu

Professional Summary

Professor Sunderland received his BA in Russian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and his masters and doctorate in history from Indiana University. Since joining the department in 1996, he has taught primarily in the fields of Russia and the Soviet Union, modern Europe, and world history. His principal research interests are in the history of the Russian Empire in the modern period. He has lived and traveled extensively in the Russian Federation and the other states of the former Soviet Union. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled The Baron's Cloak: A Story of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution. The book follows the life of a single evocative figure -- Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, the so-called "Mad Baron" of Mongolia -- to examine questions about the great changes that affected Russian imperial society in the last decades of the tsarist era.

Books

Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (Routledge, 2007) (edited with Nicholas Breyfogle and Abby Schrader).

Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Cornell, 2004; Paperback edition, 2006).

Courses Taught

Survey Courses: The Soviet Experience, 1917-1991; Russia Between Reform and Revolution, 1855-1917; World History, from Ancient Times to the Present.

Special Topics Courses: Anna Karenina's Russia; Vereshchagin's World: Russian Imperialism in Life and Art; Land of the Giant Tsar: Russia in the Age of Peter the Great; Comparative Frontiers in World History; Travel, Exploration, and Empire in the European Experience, 1500-1900.

Graduate Courses: War and Revolution in the Modern World, 1750-1914; The Literature of Modern European History, 1700-1900; Frontiers and Frontier Societies in Comparative Perspective; Methodologies of World History; Empires and Imperialism in European History, ca.1000-1914.