Andrei Znamenski has studied history and anthropology in both Russia and the United States. Formerly a resident scholar at the Library of Congress, then a foreign visiting professor at Hokkaido University in Japan, he has taught various courses at University of Toledo, Alabama State University, and the University of Memphis. His major fields of interests include Shamanism, the history of Western esotericism, Russian history, and the indigenous religions of Siberia and North America. Znamenski has lived and traveled extensively in Alaska, Siberia, and Japan.

He is the author of Shamanism in Siberia: Russian Records of Indigenous Spirituality (2003), Through Orthodox Eyes: Russian Missionary Narratives of Travels to the Dena’ina and Ahtna 1850s-1930s (2003), The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination (2007), Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia (2011), and the editor of the three-volume anthology Shamanism: Critical Concepts (2004). Check out his YouTube channel.

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Selected Scholarly Articles

• “They Want to Accept Baptism Very Much”: An Abortive Orthodox Mission to the Ahtna Indians, 1850s-1930s
• History with an Attitude: Alaska in Modern Russian Patriotic Rhetoric
• Power of Myth: Popular Ethnonationalism and Nationality Building in Mountain Altai, 1904-1922
• Power for the Powerless : Oirot/Amursana Prophecy in Altai and Western Mongolia,1890s-1920s
• The “Ethic of Empire” on the Siberian Borderland: the Peculiar Case of the “Rock People,” 1791–1878