Mikhail Akulov is a scholar of the Russian Imperial and Soviet borderlands with a focus on Ukraine and Central Asia. Born in Kazakhstan, he went on to complete his B.A. in History and Economics at Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, USA) and his Ph.D. in History at Harvard University. Since 2018, he has been working at the Nazarbayev University in Astana, the leading institute of higher learning in Central Asia.

At present, he is completing a manuscript entitled The Time of Impossible Possibilities: Ukraine between the Russian and German Revolutions. The book represents the culmination of many years of research in Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Austria, and Poland, and focuses on the entanglement between socio-political collapse and revolutionary creativity. He explores multiple, often non-national, visions of the post-Revolutionary order, which turned Ukraine into a unique place for the “impossible possibilities” ushered by the Revolution.