The grandson of the composer and ethno-musicologist Grikor Mirzaian Suni and a graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University, Ronald Grigor Suny was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan (1981-1995), where he founded and directed the Armenian Studies Program.  He was Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2015 and director of the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies from 2009 to 2012.

Representative Publications:

“They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents (Oxford University Press, 2003, 2013).
The Soviet Experiment:  Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (Oxford University Press, 1998, 2011).
A Question of Genocide:  Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2011).
The Cambridge History of Russia, III:  The Twentieth Century (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2006).
A State of Nations:  Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2001).
Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations, The Journal of Modern History Vol. 73, No. 4 (December 2001).
Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation (University of Michigan Press, 1999).
Becoming National (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Making Workers Soviet:  Power, Culture, and Identity (Cornell University Press, 1994).
The Revenge of the Past:  Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 1993).
Looking Toward Ararat:  Armenia in Modern History (Indiana University Press, 1993).
The Making of the Georgian Nation (Indiana University Press, 1988, 1994).
The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory:  Visions and Revisions (D. C. Heath, 1990).
The Baku Commune, 1917-1918:  Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972).