War of Decolonization? The Russian Empire and the Great War, 1914-1918

Joshua Sanborn is Professor and Head of the Department of History at Lafayette College (Pennsylvania, USA). He is a historian of violence, society, and politics in modern Russia. His most recent monograph is Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford University Press, 2014), which argues that the process of state failure, social collapse, violent transformation, and imperial disintegration experienced by Russia between 1914 and 1918 is analogous to processes of decolonization in Africa and Asia in the period after World War II.

Sanborn's most recent co-authored work is Gender, Sex, and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day (with co-author Annette Timm) which just came out in a revised and expanded second edition from Bloomsbury in 2016 (the first edition was published in 2007). He is also one of the charter contributing members of the Russian History Blog, which just celebrated its fifth anniversary of existence.