Albert Cavallaro

Albert Cavallaro is a cultural historian of the Russian empire and Central Asia with a focus on the 19th century. His current work examines the rapid growth of museums across Central Asia in the tsarist period. In his work museums function as sites where multiple scales - from the local to the global - come into contact and construct each other. 

Albert received his Bachelor of Arts in History and English from The College of New Jersey in 2015. He then enjoyed a brief career as an "insurance archaeologist" before receiving a Master of Arts in Global Studies (Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2019. 

Albert's dissertation, “Things Disappear: The Russian Empire, Central Asian Museums, and Imperial Love, 1876-1925” examines the growth and changing roles of museums in a developing and then crumbling colonial society.  Drawing on sources he gathered from over two years of fieldwork inside of Uzbekistan and research in over 21 archives, museums, and libraries, he argues that this period—divided by war, imperial collapse, and regime change—was united by a widespread belief in the efficacy of museums to meet the changing demands of the age. Thus, his work sheds new light on the final years of the Russian empire and the first years of the Soviet Union. Utilizing Central Asian Turki and Russian language periodicals, court records, petitions, teachers’ reports on field trips, and police investigations into illegal archaeological digs, he shows how among Muslim Turki-speaking communities and Russian colonists museums became sites of not only cultural and political significance but also places of deep emotional resonances. 

Albert has given talks on his research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor as part of the Museum Studies "Museums at Noon" discussion series,  at the Bukhara State University (Buxoro Davlat Universiteti) in Uzbekistan, at the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan National Institute of Painting and Design named after the Kamoliddin Behzod (Kamoliddin Behzod  nomidagi Milliy rassomlik va dizayn instituti), on the Uzbek popular history and politics podcast Fikrat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBiJsxIPSao&t=2005s), and on the Uzbekistan television program Madaniyat va ma’rifat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzUCnyj9Obs&t=1349s) among other places.  These latters talks, which took place in Uzbekistan, were delivered in Uzbek. 

Research Grants and Fellowships:

• Awarded a 2024-2025 Graduate Student Research Fellowship from the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 
• Awarded a 2022-2023 Stephen F. Cohen–Robert C. Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship 
• Awarded a 2022-23 American Councils Title VIII Research Scholar Award for research in Uzbekistan
• Awarded a FY2022 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship (Declined)
• Awarded the Fisher Fellow Award from the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to fund research in Illinois’s Summer Research Lab for the 2022 Summer

Research Languages:

• Russian
• Uzbek
• Central Asian Turki / Chaghatay