2025-26 Graduate Student Liaison
About
Albert Cavallaro is a historian of Central Asia and the Russian empire. Hailing from New Jersey, land of pork roll and panzarotti, he has spent the last three years working in and around the archives of Uzbekistan. Utilizing sources written in Central Asian Turki and Russian, his dissertation, "Things Disappear: The Russian Empire, Central Asian Museums and Imperial Love, 1876-1917," examines the growth, and changing utilities, of museums in 19th century Russian Turkestan. In this work, he additionally takes care to trace the histories of traveling children and beekeeping museums, as well as exploring the connection between archaeology and murder.
Albert’s research this year moves in three directions: first, utilizing a murder investigation he reconstructs a “social” history of archaeology in the 1860s, second, he examines the various actors who first proposed a museum in Tashkent in the 1870s, and finally he traces the Central Asian museum “crisis” of 1910.
