Professional Affiliation

Assistant Professor of History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Expert Bio

Anna Whittington is an assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she specializes in the history of citizenship and inequality across Soviet Eurasia.

Her first book manuscript, Repertoires of Citizenship: Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People, explores the discourses and practices of Soviet citizenship and identity from the October Revolution to the Soviet collapse. She is also continuing work on her second book, A Mirror for Society: Censuses in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Both books draw on multilingual archival research conducted in more than 30 archives and libraries in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, and on extensive experience traveling and working across the former Soviet Union.

She previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow at what is now the Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Higher School of Economics in Moscow (2018–19), the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis (2019–21), and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University (2021–22), and as a Title VIII Scholar at the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2021–22). Dr. Whittington holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan (2018), an MA from Stanford University in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2011), and an AB in history (2009) from Harvard University, with a secondary concentration in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies.

Wilson Center Project

"Repertoires of Citizenship: Inclusion, Inequality, and the Making of the Soviet People"