Stephen Badalyan Riegg

Dr. Stephen Badalyan Riegg’s research and teaching interests revolve around the histories of Modern Europe, Imperial Russia, and the Caucasus.

His first book, Russia’s Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and The Armenians, 1801-1914, traces the evolution of the Romanov government’s policies toward the Armenians of the empire. The study broke with conventional narratives of that story by embracing the complexities of this imperial encounter and moving away from the reductive question of whether Russia was a friend or foe to Armenians.

Supported by Fulbright-Hays, American Councils for International Education, and other organizations, his work won the Best Book Award from Ab Imperio and the Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies from the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research. Other recognitions include Honorable Mention for the Der Mugrdechian Outstanding Book Award from the Society for Armenian Studies and being short-listed for the European Studies Book Award from the Council for European Studies.

Currently Dr. Riegg is writing a book that shows how and why Russian imperialists in the nineteenth-century Caucasus improvised a trial-and-error program of tolerating the settlement of diverse Western European expatriates in these strategically vital borderlands. Dr. Riegg’s work on this project has won the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress and the Billington Fellowship from the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.