« Team
Lucien FRARY (PhD, University of Minnesota, 2003) is a professor of history at Rider University, where he has been teaching since 2004. His scholarly work deals with Mediterranean, Slavic, and Eastern Orthodox history and culture, in particular Russia’s interest in the Near East, since around the time of the formation of the Ottoman emirate. He is the author of Russia and the Making of Greek Identity, 1821-1844 (Oxford, 2015), the editor of Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth: Essays in Honor of Theofanis G. Stavrou (Slavica, 2017), and the co-editor of Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Recently, he edited 1821 – A New Dawn for Greece. Greek Struggle for Independence, a special issue of Online Military Studies 2 (2022), an open access journal published by De Gruyter.
He currently teaches a variety of courses on Russian history, ancient and modern Greece, the Balkans and the Ottoman empire, as well as surveys of the era of World War II, Nazi Germany and Hitler’s Europe, and the history of socialism. For the past few years, he has been working on a book about aristocratic culture and the making of imperial Russian foreign policy, based on the biography of Grigorii Aleksandrovich Stroganov (1770-1857). He has published about 100 book reviews, and numerous articles and book chapters.
For the TransCorr project, Prof. Frary is scouring the accounts of European and Russian travelers to the Ottoman Balkans. His goal is to feature a few of the key works that became fundamental to the conception of the region as backward and corrupt, and why these impressions emerged in the minds of foreigners, and how these accounts spread the news across the world. Based on this first project, he hopes to expand and discover new angles to create a clearer understanding of the region, and the topic of corruption. He also hopes to find interesting and sometimes amusing, sad, emotional, or even exciting stories about the Ottoman Balkans and corruption, that would be good to share with interested readers.
Email: [email protected]