RONALD
GRIGOR SUNY is Professor of Political Science at the University of
Chicago. The grandson of the composer and ethnomusicologist Grikor
Mirzoyan Suni and a graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia
University, he taught at Oberlin College (1968-1981), as visiting
professor of history at the University of California, Irvine (1987), and
Stanford University (1995-1996). He was the first holder of the Alex
Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan
(1981-1995), where he founded and directed the Armenian Studies Program.
He is the author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality
in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972); Armenia
in the Twentieth Century (Scholars Press, 1983); The Making of the
Georgian Nation (Indiana University Press, 1988, 1994); Looking
Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press,
1993); The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the
Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 1993); and The
Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford
University Press, 1998). He is also the editor of Transcaucasia,
Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia,
Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983;
University of Michigan Press, 1996)); and co-editor of Party, State,
and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History
(Indiana University Press, 1989); The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik
Victory: Visions and Revisions (D. C. Heath, 1990); Making Workers
Soviet: Power, Culture, and Identity (Cornell University Press, 1994);
Becoming National (Oxford University Press, 1996); Intellectuals
and the Articulation of the Nation (University of Michigan Press,
1999); and A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of
Lenin and Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2001). He is currently
working on a study of the young Stalin and the formation of the Soviet
Union and a series of essays on empire and nations. Professor Suny has
served as chairman of the Society for Armenian Studies and on the
editorial boards of Slavic Review, International Labor and
Working-Class History, International Journal of Middle East Studies,
The Armenian Review, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies,
and Armenian Forum, and is a contributing editor to Armenian
International Magazine. He has appeared numerous times on the
McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, CBS Evening News, CNN, and National Public Radio,
and has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post,
The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, New Left Review, Dissent,
and other newspapers and journals. He is married to pianist Armena
Marderosian and has two daughters, Sevan and Anoush Suni.
Professor Suny’s
intellectual interests have centered on the non-Russian nationalities of
the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, particularly those of the South
Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia). The “national question”
was an area of study that was woefully neglected for many decades until
peoples of the periphery mobilized themselves in the Gorbachev years. His
aim has been to consider the history of imperial Russia and the USSR
without leaving out the non-Russian half of the population, to see how
multinationality, processes of imperialism and nation-making shaped the
state and society of that vast country. This in turn has led to work on
the nature of empires and nations, studies in the historiography and
methodology of studying social and cultural history, and a commitment to
bridging the often-unbridgeable gap between the traditional concerns of
historians and the methods and models of other social scientists.