Igor P. Lipovsky

Professor Igor P. Lipovsky is a distinguished scholar of Near Eastern and Central Asian History. He is the author of ten books written in English and Russian, and has published more than a two hundred articles in American, British, German, and Russian journals. He successfully taught at universities in Russia, Israel, and the United States.

Lipovsky was born March 7, 1950, in Moscow, in an interfaith Russian-Jewish family. His paternal ancestors were prominent leaders and philanthropists of the Jewish community of Minsk, Belarus, while his mother (née Robinson) descended from the Russian-English family of well-known industrialists and merchants in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Having graduated with distinction from Moscow State University's Institute of Asian and African Studies, Lipovsky worked as a researcher and doctoral student at the Academy of Sciences, in Moscow. Later, because of his criticism of the totalitarian and anti-Semitic regime in the Soviet Union, he was forced to leave the country in 1987.

In 1989, Lipovsky received his Ph.D. degree in Near Eastern History in Israel and continued to teach at Haifa University's Department of Middle Eastern History for three more years (1987-1992). After the USSR’s collapse, he was invited as a visiting professor to St. Petersburg University (1993-1995) and then taught at Los Angeles (1995-97), Boston (1998-2018) and Washington D.C. (from 2019).

Now, Lipovsky is a United States citizen and lives in Washington, D.C.