Kevin Gledhill, Ph.D.

Kevin Gledhill is a historian of early modern and modern Russia, Iran and the Caspian Sea region. His research addresses the intersection of trade, political ideology, and power between northern Iran and the Lower Volga in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2020 and has taught at Yale, Clark and Quinnipiac Universities before joining the faculty at Sacred Heart in August of 2021. He teaches classes on the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the modern Middle East, Iran, and Islamic history, as well as the History of Western Civilization. He is working to adapt his dissertation into a book-length project that addresses the centrality of the Caspian Sea to Russian imperialism and the rise of Iran’s Qajar Dynasty from 1722 to 1804. The project examines the interconnection of the region through silk, cotton, iron, and other trades. His work has appeared in the journals Iranian Studies and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. He has also published in Encyclopaedia Iranica and in volume 11 of The Idea of Iran series, published by Bloomsbury Publishing. He is co-editor of a forthcoming volume that theorizes and explores the role of the Caspian Sea in connecting Central Eurasia since 1500. This volume will be published by Cornell University Press.