'I wanted to be an anthropologist when I was a schoolboy'

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, St Petersburg School of Arts and Humanities

Having graduated in history and ethnography from Moscow State University and receiving a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford, I taught at Cambridge before coming to the HSE St Petersburg in 2015. I greatly appreciate academic support of my research by the HSE University, its collegial atmosphere and the quality of its students. I specialise in Siberia and Russia, and also have carried out ethnographic research in Britain and the United States.

I am currently leading a research project on the economic anthropology of household outside metropolitan areas. My books include ‘Two Lenins: a brief anthropology of time’ (Chicago University Press and HAU Malinowski Monographs, 2017) and ‘The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia’ (Stanford University Press 2003); edited volume ‘The Topography of happiness: ethnographic contours of modernity’ (in Russian by New Literary Observer Publishers 2013) and the exhibition catalogue ‘Gifts to Soviet leaders’ (Kremlin Museum 2006).