Jonathan Raspe is a historian of modern Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia specializing in ethnicity, empire, and economic history. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the industrialization of the Soviet Union’s non-Russian republics from the interwar period through the late 1980s, Empire of Industry: Ethnicity and Industrialization across Soviet Eurasia. It examines how the Soviet fixation on industry shaped ethnicity in the Soviet Union, analyzing republican politics, shop-floor relations, elite careers, and literary representations of workers, factories, and industrial products. The book argues that industrialization integrated non-Russian communities and territories into a single body politic, but also perpetuated ethnic hierarchies and fueled distinct national interests in the Union republics.

Raspe has also begun a second book project on post-Soviet Jewish emigration to Israel, the United States, and Germany. It examines émigré experiences as a mirror of shifting ideas of Jewish identity, post-socialist transformations, and contemporary disenchantment with liberalism. An additional research project traces the history of mining in the Eurasian heartlands of Kazakhstan, Siberia, and Mongolia. Raspe’s previous publications include an article on the Soviet indigenization policy in 1920s Belarus in the Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas and an article on Jewish national autonomy in 1920s Soviet Ukraine in Nationalities Papers.