Anna Whittington is an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan, where she specializes in the history of citizenship and inequality across Soviet Eurasia.

 

Her first book manuscript, Repertoires of Citizenship: Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People, explores the discourses and practices of Soviet citizenship and identity from the October Revolution to the Soviet collapse. She is also continuing work on two additional book projects. The first, Cacophony: The Unmaking of the Soviet Union, considers grassroots mobilization in the Soviet Union's final years. The second, A Mirror for Society: Censuses in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, considers the history of enumeration. All her work draws on multilingual archival research conducted in more than 30 archives and libraries in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, and on extensive experience traveling and working across the former Soviet Union. You can learn more about research here and publications here.

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She has taught a range of courses on Russian, Soviet, Central Asian, and European history, on interdisciplinary approaches to citizenship, and on historical research and writing at all levels. You can learn more about teaching here.

 

She previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the now-shuttered Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (2018–19), the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis (2019–21), and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University (2021–22), and as a Title VIII Scholar at the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2021–22). Before returning to Michigan, she worked as an assistant professor at the Unviersity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2022–25). Dr. Whittington holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan (2018), an MA from Stanford University in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2011), and an AB in history (2009) from Harvard University, with a secondary concentration in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies.