Marshall Poe

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Marshall Tillbrook Poe (born December 29, 1961) is an American historian and the author of many works on early modern Russia (Muscovy). He is also the founder and editor of MemoryArchive, a universal wiki-type archive of contemporary memoirs.

Poe earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Grinnell College in 1984 and his Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He then taught at Harvard University until 1998, and again from 2000 to 2002. In 2001 he was appointed Allston Burr Senior Tutor at Harvard's Lowell House. He held fellowships at the Davis Center for Russian Studies (Harvard University), the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Harriman Institute for Russian Studies (Columbia University). He is the co-founder and a former editor of the academic journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. As of 2006 Poe is employed as a writer and analyst in Washington, D.C. at The Atlantic Monthly,^[1] in which he has written on topics ranging from divorce among born-again Christians to the origins and effects of the online reference Wikipedia.^[2]

In his influential essay "Note to Self: Print Monograph Dead; Invent New Publishing Model" ^[3], published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing 2002, Poe questioned the viability of the old academic publishing model and argued for using self-publishing and print on demand. He explained how he did this with one of the two volumes of his prosopographical study of the Russian elite in the early modern period. When facing the issue of sending it to journals for reviewing, he decided to do so in an electronic format as attachment with an e-mail. "Shortly after I sent the book for review", he writes, "a very worried journal editor contacted me. He was upset that I hadn't included a copyright page on the e-book I sent him. Without a copyright page, he explained, any reader could copy my book, send it all over the world, or use it in the classroom — all without my permission. That, I responded, was the point. (I'm not sure he got it.)"

The two volumes of this work were published in a paper edition by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters in 2004.

[edit] Selected publications

"Russian despotism" : the origins and dissemination of an early modern commonplace. Thesis (Ph. D. in History). University of California, Berkeley, 1993.
Foreign descriptions of Muscovy: an analytic bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1995
A people born to slavery: Russia in early modern European ethnography, 1476-1748. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000
(Ed.) The military and society in Russia: 1450-1917, edited by Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe. Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2002.
The Russian moment in world history. Princeton ; Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2003
(Ed.) The resistance debate in Russian and Soviet history, edited by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, Marshall Poe. Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica Publishers, 2003
(Ed.) Early exploration of Russia, edited by Marshall Poe. New York: Routledge, 2003.
(Ed.) Modernizing Muscovy: reform and social change in seventeenth-century Russia, edited by Jarmo Kotilaine and Marshall Poe. New York : RoutledgeCurzon, 2004
The Russian elite in the seventeenth century. Vol. 1, The consular and ceremonial ranks of the Russian "Sovereigns court" 1613-1713. (Suomalaisen tiedeakatemian toimituksia. Sarja Humaniora, 322, ISSN 1239-6982). Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004
The Russian elite in the seventeenth century. Vol. 2, A quantitative analysis of the "Duma ranks" 1613-1713. (Suomalaisen tiedeakatemian toimituksia. Sarja Humaniora, 323) Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004. Electronic edition (PDF) available from Harvard University here (alternative link, at the Michigan State University library)
(Ed. and Trans.) Russia in the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich, by Gregorii Kotoshikhin. With Ben Uroff. Bloomington; Indiana University Press. Forthcoming.
A concise history of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.