Angus Russell

Angus is a Research Fellow at King’s and works as part of the College’s Silk Roads Programme. He was born and grew up in London, and then went to Oxford to study History and Russian as an undergraduate. After some time working in publishing, he went back to Oxford for his Master’s in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, and then came to Cambridge for his PhD. At various points in between he has also spent time living and researching in Ekaterinburg, Moscow, and Paris. He has been at King’s since 2023.

Angus’ research contends with the medieval history of what might broadly be called northern Eurasia, and above all with the interactions between Rus – the polity that Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all see as their ancestor – and the Mongol Empire. His first book manuscript, Empire and Forbidden Wealth in post-Mongol Eurasia, explores that question through the cultural entanglements of fiscal practice in the regions conquered by the Mongol khans; interweaving legal, administrative, and religious texts, it tracks how political elites could be remarkably flexible in how they perceived ‘cross-cultural’ change.

This book sits alongside smaller, standalone projects on fiscal and judicial immunity after the Mongols and on the visible (and visual) archive in fourteenth-century Rus. He is in the early stages of work on a second monograph – provisionally entitled The Steppe’s New Truths – which will turn to intellectual history in thinking about how literati developed new ways of framing truth in the Mongol and post-Mongol world.