Guest speaker Erika Monahan is Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. At this event she discusses her book The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia, recently nominated for the 2016 Early Slavic Studies Association Book Prize Offered will be a fresh analysis of Siberian trade and the Russia state during the late sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. (Note, the audio recording that accompanies the talk is also posted in iTunes.) According to Donald Ostrowski (Muscovy and the Mongols), "Erika Monahan sets out nothing less than a revision of the way we imagine the Muscovite economy in the early modern era. With a deeply researched examination of trade and commerce across Eurasia, she challenges a number of ingrained assumptions about Russian trade policies as backwards, xenophobic, state-driven, and monopolistic”.