Yanni Kotsonis is the Founding Director of the Jordan Center and a historian of Russia. His expertise includes Russian economic history and political economy. He has completed a book on the history of Russian and Soviet taxation, titled States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic (Toronto, 2014).
He was educated in Athens, Montreal, Copenhagen, London, Moscow, and New York. He taught in England before coming to NYU in 1994. In his teaching he is concerned with the ways we can make intelligent comparisons between one time period and another (Imperial and Soviet Russia), and one country and another (Russia and other parts of Europe). His articleson taxation and his introduction to the book Russian Modernity reflect these interests. So does the range of courses he teaches and the variety of topics researched by his PhD students. As someone once said, “Better fewer, but better.”
Current and former PhD advisees:
Elizabeth (Betty) Banks, Russia and Africa Chia Yin Hsu, Russian Harbin and decolonization (currently assistant professor at Portland State) Ivan Kostin, Russian Civil War Brigid O’Keeffe, Soviet Roma (currently assistant professor at Brooklyn College) James Phillips, Russian and Soviet psychiatry David Rainbow, Siberian regionalism
He was a marvelous colleague, helpful to the Russian Department, to the Jordan Center, and to his colleagues. I can’t recall a time when he turned us down. I want this to be known and appreciated.
I am a member of ASEEES, a historian of the Russian Empire and the USSR, and I direct a center that is an institutional member of ASEEES. Surely I can be trusted with the facts. One may insist that it is complicated, but I insist that it is that simple.
Foreign policy is completely related to the economy. Internationally Russia has been finding itself less and less capable, less able to exert lasting influence.
It was a fascinating start to the Jordan Center’s Diasporas series which was held jointly with Glicksman Ireland House at NYU on 31 January – 1 February 2013.
What would change if the emigration were renamed and recast as a diaspora, not to keep up with the fashion but to seriously consider what vistas it might open, what might be at stake, deliberately or as we stumble into a theoretical and political minefield? Other fields have been there already and we can learn from them.