Biography

Matt Romaniello is the author of Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in the Eighteenth Century (2019) and The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552-1671 (2012). His new book, Europe's Laboratory: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia, will be published in 2025. He has begun a new project, Unplanned Obsolescence: Modernity and the Loss of the Natural World, which is a study of early-modern commodities that failed to transition to the modern era. He was the editor of Journal of World History and Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies. His latest edited volume, The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Faberge, was the runner-up for the 2021 Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.

Before coming to Weber State, he was professor of history at University of Hawai'i at Manoa, where he taught for eleven years. Before Hawai'i, he spent two years at George Mason University as a postdoctoral teaching fellow and the associate director of Making the History of 1989 for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and one year as a visiting assistant professor at Hamilton College.

Publications

Books

• Intemperate Empire: Climate and Health in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, 2025)
• Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; paperback 2021)
  • Winner of the 2019 Book Prize from the Early Slavic Studies Association
  • Interview on the New Books Network
• The Elusive Empire: Kazan and the Creation of Russia, 1552-1671 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012)

Edited Volumes

• A Frozen State: Experiencing Cold in Russian History and Culture, edited with Alison K. Smith and Tricia Starks (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming)
• The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Faberge, 1600 to the Present, edited with Alison K. Smith and Tricia Starks (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)
  • Interview on the New Books Network
• Russia in Asia: Imaginations, Interactions, and Realities, edited with Jane F. Hacking and Jeffrey S. Hardy (New York: Routledge, 2020)
• Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present, edited with Tricia Starks (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
• Contested Spaces of Nobility in Early Modern Europe, edited with Charles Lipp (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011)
• Tobacco in Russian History and Culture: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present, edited with Tricia Starks (New York: Routledge, 2009)

Special Journal Issues

• Transnational Approaches to Race and Racism, special collection for Journal of World History (2023)
• Early Modern Trade in the Caspian Region, edited with Erika Monahan, Russian Studies in History 60: 1-4 (2021)
• Health, Globally, special collection for Journal of World History (2021)
• Roads and Oceans: Rethinking Migrations and Mobility in World History, special collection for Journal of World History (2020)
• Asia in the Russian Imagination, edited with Jane F. Hacking and Jeffrey S. Hardy, Sibirica 20:1 (2020)
• European Encounters with Islam in Asia, edited with Matthew Lauzon, Journal of World History 25: 2-3 (2014)

Journal Articles

• "The Influential Influenza: The 'Russian Catarrh' Pandemic of 1781-1782," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, XX (2024): 1-16
• "Commodities with Context: Moving Materials and Medical Knowledge into Medieval Russia," Canadian-American Slavic Studies 57:3 (2023): 468-83
• "Could Siberian 'Natural Curiosities' be Replaced? Bioprospecting in the Eighteenth Century," Early Science and Medicine 27:3 (2022): 257-77
• “‘Tobacco! Tobacco!’ Exporting New Habits to Siberia and Russian America,” Sibirica 16:2 (2017): 1-26
• “True Rhubarb? Trading Eurasian Botanical and Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century,” The Journal of Global History 11:1 (2016): 3-23
• “Russian Women and Orthodox Ideals on the Early Modern Frontier,” Journal of Frontier Studies no. 3 (2016): 18-37
• “Who Should Smoke? Tobacco and the Humoral Body in Early Modern England,”  The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 27:2 (2013): 156-73
• “Russia Encounters Islam: Merchant Narratives and the Early Modern Global Economy,” World History Connected 10:1 (2013)
• "Through the Filter of Tobacco: The Limits of Global Trade in the Early Modern World," Comparative Studies of Society and History 49:4 (2007): 914-37
• "Mission Delayed: The Russian Orthodox Church after the Conquest of Kazan'," Church History 76:3 (2007): 511-40
• "Ethnicity as Social Rank: Governance, Law, and Empire in Muscovite Russia," Nationalities Papers 33:4 (2006): 447-69
• "The Profit Motive: Regional Economic Development in Muscovy after the Conquest of Kazan'," Journal of European Economic History 33:3 (2004): 663-85
• "Controlling the Frontier: Monasteries and Infrastructure in the Volga Region, 1552-1682," Central Asia Survey 19:3-4 (2000): 429-43

Book Chapters

• "Was Russia Cold? Experiencing Russia's Climate in the Early Modern Era," in A Frozen State: Experiencing Cold in Russian History and Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming)
• "Follow the Armenians: British Plans for the Caspian in the Eighteenth Century," in The Caspian World: Connections and Contentions at a Modern Eurasian Crossroads, eds. Abbas Amanat, Kevin Gledhill, and Kayhan Nejad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2025)
• "Making Fish Guts into Isinglass and Glue," in The Life Cycle of Russian Things: From Fish Guts to Faberge, 1600 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 71-85
• "'This whole business should be kept very Secret': The English Tobacco Workhouses in Moscow," in Commercial Cosmopolitanism? Cross-Cultural Objects, Spaces, and Institutions in the Early Modern World, ed. Felicia Gottmann (London: Routledge, 2021), 92-107
• "Astrakhan and Orenburg: Russia's Asian Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian Commercial History, ed. David Ludden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)
• “‘Grandeur and Show’: Clothing, Commerce, and the Capital in Early Modern Russia,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Legislation in Comparative and Global Contexts, edited by Ulinka Rublack and Giorgio Riello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 375-92
• “Trans-regional Trade in Early Modern Eurasia,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, ed. David Ludden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
• “Humoral Bodies in Cold Climates,” in Russian History through the Senses: From 1700 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 23-43
• “Customs and Consumption: Russia's Global Tobacco Habits in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Global Lives of Things: Materiality, Material Culture and Commodities in the First Global Age, ed. Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (London: Routledge, 2016), 183-97
• “Trade and the Global Economy,” in Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, c. 1350-1750, ed. Hamish Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), II: 307-33
• "The Facade of Order: Claiming Imperial Space in Early Modern Russia," in The Limits of Empire: European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History, ed. Tonio Andrade and William Reger (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 183-204
• "Muscovy's Extraordinary Ban on Tobacco," in Tobacco in Russian History and Culture: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2009), 9-25
• "Grant, Settle, Negotiate: Military Service in the Middle Volga Region," in Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, ed. Nicholas Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (New York: Routledge, 2007), 61-77 

Reviews

Over 40 book reviews published in The American Historical Review, The English Historical Review, Slavic Review, Russian Review, Slavonic and East European Review, Ab Imperio, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, Russian History/Histoire Russe, Journal of World History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Enterprise and Society, The Journal of Early Modern History, The Sixteenth Century Journal, International Journal of Maritime History, and The Historian

Talks