Alexander M. Martin
Associate Professor 
Field
Modern Europe, 18th—19th century Russia
Profile
Alexander Martin focuses on Imperial Russia between the mid-18th and late 19th century. In Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (1997) he examines the genesis of modern Russian conservatism in the era of the Napoleonic Wars. He has edited and translated Dmitrii Rostislavov’s Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: The Memoir of a Priest’s Son (2002), an account of a village boy’s encounter with Imperial Russia’s schools, bureaucracy, and hierarchical social order in the early 19th century. More recently he has written on the experience of Russian civilians in the Napoleonic Wars and on how educated Russians thought about urban modernization.
His research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Councils on International Education (ACTR-ACCELS), the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research (NCEEER), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and the American Philosophical Society. He is also one of the three editors of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, a leading U.S. journal in the field.
Martin grew up in Germany, Switzerland, and France, and was educated at Cornell, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Current Project
Enlightened Absolutism and Urban Modernity in Moscow, 1763-1881
Actor, Merchant, Mason, Pastor: The Self-Fashioning of J. A. Rosenstrauch in Germany and Russia, 1768-1835
Teaching Interests
Early modern and Imperial Russia; Europe in the “long” 19th century history, particularly political, intellectual, social, and urban history.
Recent Publications
“Sewage and the City: Filth, Smell, and Representations of Urban Life in Moscow, 1770-1880,” Russian Review 67, no. 2 (April 2008): 243-74
“Lost Arcadia: The 1812 War and Russian Images of Aristocratic Womanhood,” European History Quarterly 37, no. 4 (October 2007): 603-21
“Debating ‘Backwardness’ in Russian History,” in NewsNet: News of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 47, no. 2 (March 2007), pp. 1, 10-14.
“Down and Out in 1812: The Impact of the Napoleonic Invasion on Moscow’s Middling Strata,” in Roger Bartlett and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli, eds., Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society, Culture, Economy. Papers From the VII International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, Wittenberg 2004 (Münster and Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2007), pp. 429-41
“Russia and the Legacy of 1812,” in Dominic Lieven, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 145-61
“The Invention of ‘Russianness’ in the Late 18th—Early 19th Century,” in Ab Imperio, no. 3, 2003: 169-92
“Precarious Existences: Middling Households in Moscow and the Fire of 1812,” in Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber, ed. Marsha Siefert(Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2003), pp. 67-82
“The Response of the Population of Moscow to the Napoleonic Occupation of 1812,” in The Military and Society in Russia, 1450-1917, eds. Marshall Poe and Eric Lohr (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 469-89
“The Russian Empire and the Napoleonic Wars,” in Napoleon and Europe, ed. Philip Dwyer(London, New York: Longman, 2001), pp. 243-63
Contact
Office: 412 Decio Faculty Hall
Phone: (574) 631-9907
Email: a.m.martin@nd.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday 11:00-1:00, TTh 5:00-5:30, or by appointment