Griffin Creech is an historian of borders and citizenship. Focusing on the Russia-Mongolia borderlands and their indigenous inhabitants, the Buriyads, Griffin's dissertation "Perpetual Strangers: Buriyad Citizenship in the Russia-Mongolia Borderlands, 1822-1939" follows pastoral nomadic Buriyads across the international border separating the Russian Empire and Soviet Union from Mongolia. Tracing these states' efforts to claim Buriyads as citizens in an age of imperial collapse, rising nationalism, and new visions of sovereignty, the project explores indigenous methods of navigating borderland life in this tumultuous period.
Creech's work has appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Revolutionary Russia and on the "Peripheral Histories" blog. In May 2023, he passed comprehensive exams with distinction in three fields: Modern Russia (1552-1991); Modern Inner Asia (1750-1991); and Frontiers, Borders, and Borderlands.
Creech spent the 2023-4 academic year conducting research for his dissertation through the Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship in Russian Historical Studies. His work has also been supported by the New York Public Library Short Term Research Fellowship, the Association for Asian Studies, the American Historical Association, the Ralph Fisher Fellowship at the University of Illinois Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.
Before graduate school, Creech was the Outreach and Communications Coordinator at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies; an English Teacher Trainer with the U.S. Peace Corps in Mongolia; a trainer for the Future Leaders’ Exchange (FLEX) program for Mongolian high school students; and a primary school teacher in Moscow, Russia. His teaching experience spans elementary school to university, including students between the ages of 8 and 60.
Prospective or admitted students working on Russia, Inner/Central Asia, or transnational topics should feel free to contact Griffin with any questions about graduate life in the department or doing research in these regions.
Committee: Peter Holquist, Benjamin Nathans, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Christopher Atwood
CV available upon request
B.A., History (Highest Honors) and Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016
Certificate in Russian Language and Russian/Soviet History, Saratov State University (Russia) (2016)
M.A., History, University of Pennsylvania, 2022
Borders and borderlands
Citizenship
Migration
Late Russian Empire
Early Soviet Union
Inner Asia
Central Asia
Mongolia
Buriyad studies
“A Russian Businessman in Washington: PP Batolin and U.S.-Russia Relations in late 1918,” Revolutionary Russia 33, no. 1 (2020): 67–87
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
American Center for Mongolian Studies (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia)