Ekaterina Pravilova

A native of St. Petersburg (Russia), Professor Ekaterina Pravilova received her Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences. She was a research scholar at the Academy of Sciences, and taught history at the European University at St. Petersburg from 2002 to 2006. She joined the faculty at Princeton in the fall of 2006. Her research interests vary greatly, ranging from the development of Russian law, economy and governance, to the study of imperial art and historiography.

Pravilova’s first book Legality and Individual Rights: Administrative Justice in Russia, (2000, in Russian) explores the regimes of governance in the Russian Empire, with a special emphasis on legal relationship between the individual and the Russian absolutist state. Her second book Finances of Empire: Money and Power in Russia’s National Borderlands (2006, in Russian) analyzes budgetary and monetary relations between Russian imperial core and its borderland regions -  Poland, Finland, Turkestan and Transcaucasia.

Pravilova’s third book A Public Empire: Property and the Quest for the Common Good in Imperial Russia (2014) traces the development of Russian property regimes from the time of Catherine the Great through World War I and the revolutions of 1917. This work demonstrates the emergence of a liberal (though not individualistic) vision of society joined to new practices of owning “public things” – rivers, forests, historical monuments, the objects of art and literary masterpieces. 

This inquiry spotlights a phenomenon that was never fully institutionalized in Russian law but nevertheless existed in rhetoric, politics, and popular imagination – namely, the concept of “public property,” the “res publica,” a world of things to be owned by the public yet managed by the state on the public’s behalf.  A Public Empire received several awards, including George L. Mosse Prize (American Historical Association), Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize (Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies), Historia Nova Prize (Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation and Academic Studies Press).

Pravilova is currently working on two projects. One of them, Imperial epistemology. Knowledge, power and authenticity in Russian politics and culture focuses on the problems of knowledge in Russian social sciences and humanities. Second project Political Money. A history of the Russian ruble (1768-1917) explores the use of money as a means of effecting or blocking fundamental political transformation, first of all - the reform of autocratic political system and the introduction of political representation. This project has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Source: Princeton University 

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