Ekaterina Pravilova specializes in the history of the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union, the history of currencies and law. She has been the director of Princeton’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and is currently running the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies.

Selected Publications

The Ruble. A Political History

Oxford University Press, 2023. 560 pp.

• Winner of Ed A Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia, and/or Eastern Europe 
• History Today's Books of the Year 2023 

Reviewed

• Andrew Stuttaford, "Imperial Tender," The Wall Street Journal
• Catriona Kelly, “Economics of the Madhouse. The Peculiar History of the Russian Ruble,” Times Literary Supplement
• Carey K. Mott, “How Dictators Make Money—and Money Makes Dictators,” Foreign Policy
• Sergei Antonov, “Book notes: The ruble: a political history, by Ekaterina Pravilova,” Central Banking
• Kristy Ironside, “The Ruble and Russian Autocracy,” Current History

Podcasts

• “Writing the History of Money and Monetary Policy. A Conversation with Ekaterina Pravilova and Rebecca Spang,” New Books Network 
• “Why a weak ruble is good for Russia's budget but not Putin's image,” Planet Money. NPR. 
• “Money talks: what the ruble tells us about about Russia,” Bunker
• "Ekaterina Pravilova, The Ruble," A Book with Legs

A Public Empire. Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. 448 pp.

• Winner of George L. Mosse Prize 2015, American Historical Association
• Winner of 2015 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies
• Winner of 2015 Historia Nova Prize, Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation and Academic Studies Press
• Honorable Mention for 2015 J. Willard Hurst Book Prize, Law and Society Association

Fellowships

• 2022 – The National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship
• 2022 – Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin fellowship
• 2018 – Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2010 – American Council of Learned Societies. Charles Ryskamp Fellowship

Current Projects

Injustice in Kishinev. Truth, Law, and Russia’s First Atrocity Trial.

This book project examines the series of trials that followed the anti-Jewish pogrom in Kishinev (Chișinău) in 1903. Drawing on archival documents, including testimonies from hundreds of victims, as well as depositions from perpetrators and witnesses, the book explores how the Russian judiciary and society grappled with questions of truth, trust, and violence. It argues that the Kishinev trials served as a significant precursor to the testimony-driven atrocity trials of the post-World War II era.

Read more: “Why were we beaten?” Atrocity, Law, and Truth, Liberties, Summer 2024, vol.3, no.4

Russia’s Truth

This project explores how Russian artists, writers, theater directors, archaeologists, historians, and museum curators approached the problems of authenticity and truthfulness and what they did to detect and confront forgeries and lies. Centered on cultural and intellectual life in the fin-de-siècle Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russian Truths offers an unconventional history of pragmatic epistemology.

Read more:

“Truth, Facts, and Authenticity in Russian Imperial Jurisprudence and Historiography,” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 21, Number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 7-39.

“The Trouble with Authenticity: Backwardness, Imitation, and the Politics of Art in Late Imperial Russia,” in The Journal of Modern History, 2018, 90:3, 536-579.

“Contested Ruins: Nationalism, Emotions, and Archaeology at Armenian Ani, 1892–1918,” in Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space, 1(2016), 69-101.

Envisioning the Future: The Transnational History of Budgets

This project examines the evolution of national budgets as a tool for envisioning financial futures. How did the structure of budgets change over time, reflecting the expansion of states, their imperial ambitions, multinational frameworks, and financial asymmetries? Building on my previous research on Russian imperial budgets, this study incorporates a new comparative analysis of budgetary mechanisms in early modern and modern states.