2024-25 Graduate Student Research Fellow
About
Albert Cavallaro is a historian of the Russian empire and Central Asia with a focus on the nineteenth century. His dissertation, "Things Disappear: The Turkestan Public Museum and Imperial Love, 1876-1917," examines the rapid growth of museums across Central Asia in the tsarist period. Via an intensive focus on the Turkestan Public Museum, located in modern-day Tashkent, Uzbekistan, he shows a variety of actors embracing museums, libraries, and collections of old materials as sites of intensive emotional identification, or “love,” for a variety of purposes. Accordingly, his work investigates entanglements of museums, colonialism, religion, science, and love in nineteenth-century Tashkent.
Following two years in Uzbekistan, Cavallaro will work on two dissertation chapters during this fellowship. The first investigates how an insurrection against Russian colonial rule impacted museum policy and outreach. The second examines how finds of old coins led village and city residents to dig, donate, and, at times, murder.
