Paul W. Werth is Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he has primarily studied the history of religious diversity and confessional policy in imperial Russia. He completed a BA at Knox College and PhD at the University of Michigan. Werth’s books include At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region (Cornell, 2002), The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 2014), and his most recent monograph, 1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution (Oxford, 2021). His scholarly articles have appeared in Social History, Journal of Modern History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Slavic Review, Ab Imperio, Cahiers du monde russe, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, which he co-edited from 2010-2015. Werth has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Center for Advanced Study at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Slavic Research Center at the University of Hokkaido, among others.
In his current project, Russia’s Enclosure (under contract with Oxford), Werth investigates the long and complex history of Russia’s border, spanning three continents from the earliest boundary-making in the medieval period through the present. Based on a growing secondary literature across disciplines and archival research, the project asks both how official Russia conceptualized and sought to reinforce the country’s physical limits, and how sundry historical actors and institutions—from border guards and customs officers to pilgrims and nomads—experienced the border and sometimes defied its injunctions. Werth proposes that borders and border-making implicate a wide range of issues central to both history and the present: geopolitics and diplomacy, sovereignty and citizenship, mobility and migration, violence and coercion, commerce and contraband, technology and intelligence. Russia’s Enclosure will integrate these diverse realms of inquiry into scholarship accessible to a broad readership concerned with Eurasia’s past and present.
Meet Paul W. Werth
A short portrait filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center, introducing the work and ideas behind fellows’ projects in Berlin.
Upcoming events
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Past events
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Berlin Journal Articles
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Books
Books written by fellows of the Academy, many begun during a semester in Berlin.
Videos
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The Russia Within
Paul Werth discusses a smaller entity within that larger, multinational country ruled from Moscow or St. Petersburg.
Fellow Spotlight: Paul W. Werth
Paul W. Werth investigates the long and complex history of Russia’s border, spanning three continents, from the medieval period through the present.
Explore Past Fellows
Hakim Abderrezak
Marco Abel
David Abraham
