Oleksandr Polianichev holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and has been affiliated with Södertörn University since 2019. He is based at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies. He has held fellowships at the New Europe College in Bucharest, the Centre for Advanced Study in Sofia, the German Historical Institute in Moscow, the Herder Institute in Marburg, GWZO in Leipzig, the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, and CERCEC in Paris.

His research focuses on the history of Imperial Russia, particularly the Caucasus, with broader interests in the global history of empire and colonialism in the long nineteenth century and in Russia’s transimperial entanglements.

His first book project, based on his doctoral dissertation and tentatively titled Subversive Loyalty: Ukraine and Empire at the Foot of the Caucasus, 1790s–1917, traces the settler-colonial afterlife of the Zaporozhian Host—one of the oldest Cossack communities in Eurasia, which played a formative role in Ukrainian statehood in the mid-seventeenth century. The book explores the Cossacks' history beyond mainland Ukraine, charting their transformation from a persecuted group of unruly brigands into exemplary colonizers, pioneers of civilization, and guardians of empire who evoked their participation in the imperial project as a form of claims-making that combined loyalty to the throne and local pride. Drawing on extensive archival research in 20 archives and libraries across four countries, as well as newspapers, memoirs, travel accounts, and fiction, the book contributes to debates on empire and nation in tsarist Russia—and on Ukraine’s historical experience under imperial rule—by demonstrating how the empire inadvertently encouraged emerging Ukrainian sentiment. At the same time, it argues that imperial and local allegiances espoused by Ukrainian Cossack loyalists did not only reinforce, but often subverted one another, challenging the very imperial system they were called to shore up.

His second book project, Exotic Empire: The South Caucasus and the Making of the Tsarist Tropics, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, is an environmental history of the tsarist colonial endeavor in Georgia and the Caucasus Black Sea coast during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It examines how, in the absence of tropical colonies, the Russian Empire reimagined the South Caucasus as a quasi-tropical colony capable of producing exotic commodities for the metropole. Focusing on the idea and practices of acclimatization, the project shows how the introduction of subtropical and tropical plant species through botanical gardens, learned societies, experimental stations, and private enterprises, led to the emergence of Tsarist Russia’s “humid subtropical” zone with tea plantations, bamboo groves, orange orchards, and ornamental palm trees. The book waves tsarist experiences into a broader picture of global colonialism to present the Russian Empire as an unexpected participant in the transimperial and intertropical exchange of ideas, plants, and expertise.