Recent Episodes
The Deforestation of Eastern Ukraine
This week we check-in with frequent EK guest Brian Milakovsky to learn about the destruction of forests in Ukraine. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and its full-scale assault in 2022, war has destroyed much of the...
From Great Fear to the Great Terror
As frequent listeners know, my advisor and friend Arch Getty passed away from cancer a few months ago. I was recently in Los Angeles to attend his memorial. I got to catch up with fellow grad students and friends. One was Jam...
Communists and NY's Hotel Workers Union
In 1912, a strike of 18,000 restaurant and hotel workers in New York City birthed the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International, a union representing tens of thousands of Manhattan’s service workers. The union still exists...
City Symphonies
What does it mean for the city to be a symphony? True, city symphonies are a silent film genre best represented by Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttmann. These early silent films tried to capture the “sound” of the city by editing...
Russia's 1993 Constitutional Crisis
In early October 1993, tanks pummeled the Russian Duma in central Moscow. It was a dark mirror of just two years prior when Boris Yeltsin definitely climbed atop a tank and made history. Now, tanks were again Yeltsin’s histor...
Anthropology of Oil
Yale anthropologist Doug Rogers visited Pitt back in April. The Eurasian Knot couldn’t resist pulling him into the studio. Doug was one of the earliest guests on the show. So it was about time to reconnect and have a wide ran...
Green Cities in the USSR and Brazil
What makes a city happy? That is, what makes a city livable and responsive to humans’ physical, emotional and cultural needs? Over the last century, city planners have turned to the maintenance of green spaces within urban ju...
Abortion (Bio)politics in Russia
In the waning decades of the Soviet Union, abortion was the main form of birth control. For example, official statistics from the late 1970s report that there were 250-270 abortions per 100 live births. It’s an astounding num...
Romanian Presidential Elections
On May 17, the centrist, pro-EU Nicusor Dan narrowly defeated George Simion, a far-right populist, in Romania’s Presidential Election. The bout was the latest in a string of contests that stoked fears for European liberal dem...
Remembering J. Arch Getty
Last week, our friend, mentor, teacher, and comrade, J. Arch Getty, died from his battle with lung cancer. As a way to remember him, here’s an interview I did with Arch in 2017 about his career and scholarship. Guest: J. Arch...
Muslim Refugees in the Ottoman Empire
Between the 1850s and World War I, about one million North Caucasian Muslims fled to the Ottoman Empire. Some, like the Circassians, ran from a Russian perpetrated genocide. Others, like Chechens, Dagestanis, and others the v...
Migration and Climate Change
Few migrants report climate change as a specific push to leave their home. Climate change is more an extra add-on to existing precarity. According to the World Bank, extreme weather, rising sea levels, violence, and resource ...
About the Hosts
Sean Guillory
Host and Producer
Sean Guillory is the founder and host of the Eurasian Knot. He's a historian of Russia/Soviet Union and a podcaster. But has since embraced the art of audio narrative. Sean works in the University of Pittsburgh's Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Center where he holds the undistinguished title of Digital Scholarship Curator. He's a Los Angeleno at heart and misses three things about the City of Angels: the Lakers, In-N-Out Burger, and the weather. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for reasons he's still trying to figure out.
Rusana Novikov
Co-Host
Rusana Novikova is the co-host of The Eurasian Knot. She is currently completing her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from UC Berkeley. She writes about the intersections of environmental change, colonial history, and land development in Siberia and the Russian Far East. She also experiments with sensory ethnography, using the power of film and sound to immerse audiences in the lived experiences of her interlocutors. Listen to Ainu Fever, her first audio documentary.