Stuart Finkel is a historian and Chair of the Department of East European, Eurasian, & Russian Studies. He teachs courses on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, the history of human rights, and related subjects. He is currently working on a multi-volume project surveying the long, complex history of aid to political prisoners & exiles in Russia and the Soviet Union, critically engaging with the burgeoning scholarship on the origins and genesis of international humanitarianism & human rights. The first book, Revolutionary Philanthropy: Aid to Political Prisoners and Exiles in Late Imperial Russia which details the origins of "political philanthropy" in the late nineteenth century, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

A sequel, tentatitively entitled Defending the Enemy: The Political Red Cross and Aid to Soviet Political Prisoners, will provide a detailed examination of the so-called "Political Red Cross" (PRC), which lobbied on behalf of and tried to support political prisoners and exiles from 1918 through 1937, up to the height of the Stalinist terror. He is concurrently working on a short monograph that will provide the first English-language biographical overview of the long and fascinating life of the PRC's longtime director, Ekaterina Peshkova (1876-1965).

He also continues more broadly to investigate the contentious but persistent notion of Russian intellectuals as "public actors," expanding on his previous scholarship on their sharply contested role following the Revolutions of 1917. His first book, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (Yale University Press, 2007) examined the series of disputes culminating in the expulsion of scores of prominent intellectuals from early Soviet Russia and the initial severe restrictions on autonomous civil society under the Bolsheviks.

Prior to coming to Dartmouth, he taught for a number of years in the History Department at the University of Florida.