Krista Goff is an award-winning scholar who serves as an associate professor of history at the University of Miami. She is also co-editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and co-director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian (REEES) Think Tank, which is a national program based at Howard University and a leading DEIA initiative for underrepresented and underserved students in East European and Eurasian studies. In 2023, Goff was awarded the prestigious Dan David Prize, which is the world’s largest prize for practitioners of historical disciplines.
Professor Goff is a historian of Soviet and post-Soviet history. In her research and teaching she explores the interrelated themes of nationalism, citizenship, empire, minoritization, and migration. Her most recent book, Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus critically examines asymmetries of power and processes of minoritization in the Soviet Union, and explains why history writing on this topic has proven so problematic in the past. Nested Nationalism has won numerous prizes, including the Rothschild Prize from the Association for the Study of Nationalities, the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Baker-Burton Award from the European Section of the Southern Historical Association, and the Biennial Best Book in Slavic Studies Award from the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies. She also co-edited Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands, which interrogates the mutual shaping of empires and nations, as well as the persistence and frequency of coercive measures that imposed belonging or denied it to populations deemed inconvenient or undesirable in this region. Currently, Goff is collaborating on a digital mapping project that critically examines the interplay of erasure, power, and empire in Soviet-era ethnographic maps of the Caucasus.
She has held postdoctoral and research fellowships at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Her research has also been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Doris G. Quinn Foundation, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, American Councils, the University of Michigan, the University of Miami, and others. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, A.M. from Brown University, B.A. with honors from Macalester College, and has studied at universities in St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, and Baku.
Education
| Ph.D. , University of Michigan | |
| A.M. , Brown University | |
| B.A. , Macalester College |
Soviet history, nationalism, empire, oral history
Publications
Goff, Krista A., and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, eds. Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019). [Link]
Goff, Krista A., “‘Why not love our language and our culture?’ National rights and citizenship in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union,” Nationalities Papers 43:1 (2015): 27-44. [Link]
