Rate My Professor James Meyer

James Meyer is a Professor of History in the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University, where he teaches courses in History and holds affiliations with the Asian Studies program and the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Minor. Specializing in Islamic World History, his research centers on the Turkic world, the Middle East, Islam in Russia and the USSR, and Eurasia. Meyer examines human mobility, communications, cross-cultural interactions, Muslim identity, conversion, apostasy, literacy, and political discourses in late imperial Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. He employs primary sources in Turkish, Russian, Ottoman Turkish, and Arabic-script versions of Turkic languages spoken in Russia and the former USSR. With over 25 years of experience living in and writing about Turkey and the former Soviet Union, Meyer joined Montana State University in August 2009 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 2015, and advanced to full professor. He earned a PhD in Middle Eastern and Russian History from Brown University in 2007 and an MA from Princeton University. Prior to his faculty appointment, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Meyer's scholarship has been supported by prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program research grant in Russia during 2016-2017, where he conducted research in Moscow on the renowned Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet and contemporary Russian life; a fellowship from the NEH and American Research Institute in Turkey; and a research fellowship at Columbia University's Harriman Institute. His major publications include the monograph Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and His Generation (Oxford University Press, 2023). Key peer-reviewed articles comprise 'Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1914' (2007), 'Speaking Sharia to the State: Muslim Protesters, Tsarist Officials, and the Islamic Discourses of Late Imperial Russia' (Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2013), 'Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy' (2016), and 'Children of Trans-Empire: Nâzım Hikmet and the First Generation of Turkish Students at Moscow's Communist University of the East' (2018). Additionally, he authored 'For the Russianist in Istanbul and the Ottomanist in Russia: A Guide to the Archives of Eurasia' (2008). Meyer's work has appeared in leading journals such as Middle Eastern Studies and the American Historical Review, contributing to understandings of transnational Muslim communities and imperial borderlands.