DrRoman Osharov

​Roman Osharov is a historian of the Russian Empire in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Roman is currently a European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow on the “Land Limits: Towards a connected history of population, environmental change, capital and conflict in Russian Eurasia, 1860s-1920s” project led by Professor Jennifer Keating. 

His current project focuses on the history of manganese mining in western Georgia under the rule of the Russian Empire. Specifically, he investigates how the discovery of manganese affected rural communities in the region from the 1870s through to the 1920s. His goal is to tell an environmentally literate history of the region by examining land reform, resource extraction and trade.

Prior to joining the School of History at University College Dublin, Roman was a DPhil student at the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, where his research focused on Russian rule in southern Central Asia in the Tsarist period. He began studying the history of the Russian Empire and Central Asia in 2019, building on some of his earlier work done while studying at King’s College London.

Research for his DPhil has taken him to archives and libraries across Eurasia, including Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia, as well as to holdings in the United Kingdom and the United States.

In 2025, Roman was also a visiting scholar at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.