Valerie Kivelson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia, both from Cornell, and Autocracy in the Provinces: Russian Political Culture and the Gentry in the Seventeenth Century. She is coeditor of Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, The New Muscovite Cultural History: A Collection in Honor of Daniel B. Rowland, and Orthodox Russia: Studies in Belief and Practice.