Nearer Neighbors Than We Imagined: Russia and the Geography of Empire in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

My project examines the intersecting geopolitical imaginaries of the United States and Russia from the American Revolutionary era to the US Civil War. More than a literary-historical study, this project is a comparative and interdisciplinary examination of how American national identity, spatial representation, settler-colonial philosophy, and emergent imperial power co-evolved through exchange with the Russian empire. The project demonstrates how the cultural comparisons between the United States and Russia not only predate the fraught ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, but how Russia has long functioned—and even now continues to function—as both mirror and foil for American identity.

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