Erik Zitser, Ph.D.

Ernest ("Erik") Zitser is the Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies and library liaison to the International Comparative Studies (ICS) Program. He is an active member of a number of professional organizations, including the Association for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies (ASEEES); East Coast Consortium of Slavic Library Collections (ECC); and Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association (ECRSA).

Background

Dr. Zitser, a native of Soviet Ukraine, received his Ph.D. in Russian History from Columbia University. Prior to coming to Duke, he worked consecutively as a post-doctoral Fellow, Center Associate, and Librarian of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He has held fellowships at the Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies (UCLA), the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies (Columbia University), the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University (FHI), and the National Humanities Center (NHC).

Publications

Dr. Zitser is the author of The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004; Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2008), and has published in both historical and library journals on a wide variety of topics. He has contributed blog posts to Humanities@DukeLibraries, Duke Digital Collections, The Devil's Tale: Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Been All Around This World: Missives from the International & Area Studies Department and All the Russias' blog of the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. He is also the co-founder and general editor of an open access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal called ВИВЛIОθИКА: E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies (ISSN 2333-1658).