Prof. Ronald Grigor Suny, Ph.D.

Profile

The renowned scholar of Russian, Armenian, and Caucasian history Prof. Ronald Grigor Suny, Ph.D. is from July to mid-August 2016 Visiting Research Fellow of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies in Munich. Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. He has also been teaching as Senior Reseacher at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.

Earlier Ronald G. Suny amongst others served as the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History as well as Director of the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Michigan. He was the first the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan, after beginning his career as an assistant professor at Oberlin College. He is a 2013 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Suny earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1968 for his study The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972).

Ronald Grigor Suny’s fields of study are Russian, Armenian and Caucasian history, nationalism, ethnic conflict and genocide. In his recent monography "’They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide" (2015), Suny is the first to explore the psychological factors as well as the international and domestic events that helped lead to genocide, drawing on archival documents and eyewitness accounts. In his New York Times’ article “The Cost of Turkey’s Genocide Denial” (23.04.2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/opinion/the-cost-of-turkeys-genocide-denial.html), Suny demands of the Turkish government and foreign politicians a more responsible handling of history. Historical truths have to be recognized and articulated in order to initiate the process of healing. Otherwise ultranationalist and anti-democratic groups could gain in strength and threaten democracy in Turkey. Professor Suny is currently working on a two-volume biography of Stalin and a co-authored history of Russia entitled “Russia’s Empires”.

Fellowship

• Visiting Fellow at the Graduate School in Munich, July – August 2016

Publications (selected)

Monographs

"They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide, Princeton 2015.

(Hg.): Cambridge History of Russia, Volume III: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge 2006.

The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, New York et al. 1998; 2011.

The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Stanford 1993.

Zus. mit Diane C. Koenker und William G. Rosenberg (Hg.): Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History, Bloomington 1989.

Armenia in the Twentieth Century, Chico 1983.

The Making of the Georgian Nation, Bloomington/Stanford 1988; London 1989; 2. Aufl., Bloomington 1994.

The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution, Princeton 1972.