Roman Osharov
Leave to Supplicate: October 2025
Roman Osharov is a DPhil Candidate at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of History, where his dissertation examines the Russian Empire's production of knowledge about Central Asia in the nineteenth century, its uses and limits. He began studying the history of the Russian Empire and Central Asia in 2019, building on some of his earlier work done while studying at King’s College London. Research for his DPhil has taken him to archives and libraries across Eurasia, including Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia, as well as to holdings in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Roman is an incoming European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of History at University College Dublin, where his research will focus on the environmental history of the Russian Empire and the history of the South Caucasus, 1801-1917.
Teaching [selection]
In Michaelmas term 2022, I was a non-stipendiary Lecturer at New College teaching the 3rd year History course for undergraduate students on the Empire and Nation in Russia and the USSR course.
I was also a Junior Teaching Fellow at the Krasis programme at the Ashmolean Museum. Read my blog for the Museum based on my introductory class on the history of Central Asia here.
Conferences, presentations and workshops [selection]
Customary Law and the Production of Knowledge in the Caucasus and Central Asia, 1870-1890, Harvard University, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Nazarbayev University, Astana, August 2025.
Russian Central Asia, a View from Simla: The Trans-Imperial Exchange of Knowledge and Expertise, 1895-1907, Columbia University, Harriman Institute, New York, April 2024.
N. S. Lykoshin and his Letters from Native Tashkent series, 1894-1896, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Conference, Robinson College, Cambridge, April 2022.
In Hillary term 2024, I had co-convened a one-day workshop, Approaches and Perspectives for the Caucasus and Central Asia, which provided a forum for graduate students and early career researchers working on the two regions across the disciplines ranging from History and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies to Area Studies and Political Science. I had organised the panels on the Caucasus and Central Asia in the Tsarist period and presented one of my work-in-progress papers.
Press and Outreach
I discussed my work in the archives in the Caucasus and Central Asia for a chapter of my dissertation on a region in modern-day Turkmenistan on the CAPS Unlock podcast, Paper trails and memory: Exploring Central Asia’s archives.
My report on fieldwork conducted in Kazakhstan during the summer of 2024, written for the newsletter of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, Trio of research joys in Almaty [pdf].
In Russian
Роман Ошаров является аспирантом Факультета Истории в Оксфордском университете. Диссертация Ошарова посвящена истории Российской империи и Центральной Азии в конце XIX — начале XX века. Он начал изучать историю Центральной Азии в 2019 году, опираясь на некоторые из своих предыдущих работ, выполненных во время обучения в Королевском колледже Лондонского университета.
