Sean Griffin

In the work, Griffin investigates the memory politics of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church. The study documents the complex and ambivalent relations between the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate and uncovers their collaborative efforts to transform public memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, in the three decades since the disintegration of the USSR.

Griffin's first book, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus, was published with Cambridge University Press in 2019. The chroniclers of medieval Rus were monks, who celebrated the divine services of the Byzantine church throughout every day. His study is the first to analyze how these rituals shaped their writing of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the first written history of the East Slavs. 

The Liturgical Past has been awarded two international book prizes. In 2020, it was awarded the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize from ASEEES. The prize recognizes ‘a first published monograph that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia's past’. The book was also recently announced as the winner of the Ecclesiastical History Society Book Prize for the best first monograph published in 2019 in the field of ecclesiastical history.

Griffin is a lecturer in the Department of Russian, the Department of Religion, and MALS. From 2017-2020, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. In 2016-2017, he was a Volkswagen Foundation fellow in Münster, Germany, and before that he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University.