He specializes in the history of modern Russia with broader interests in transnational histories of legal culture and capitalism, as well as violence and warfare. His first book, Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia: Debt, Property, and the Law in the Age of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, will appear from Harvard University Press in October, 2016. The book is based on close readings of unpublished court cases capturing the culture of informal personal credit in Russia, and for the first time addresses such topics as credit networks, usury, debt imprisonment, and bankruptcy in nineteenth-century Russia. It also reassesses traditional views of the weakness of the rule of law in imperial Russia, arguing that even before the landmark court reform of 1864 the courts were reasonably efficient at delineating and enforcing private property rights.