Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Cornell University Press 2016).

Part of the Cornell Studies in Money series. Winner of the 2017 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, the 2017 Ed A Hewett Book Prize, the 2017 Marshall Shulman Book Prize, and the 2017 CPSA Prize in International Relations.

Priests of Prosperity explores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary guardians. Juliet Johnson conducted more than 160 interviews in seventeen countries with central bankers, international assistance providers, policymakers, and private-sector finance professionals over the course of fifteen years. She argues that a powerful transnational central banking community concentrated in Western Europe and North America integrated postcommunist central bankers into its network, shaped their ideas about the role of central banks, and helped them develop modern tools of central banking. Johnson’s detailed comparative studies of central bank development in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan take readers from the birth of the campaign in the late 1980s to the challenges faced by central bankers after the global financial crisis. As the comfortable certainties of the past collapse around them, today’s central bankers in the postcommunist world and beyond find themselves torn between allegiance to their transnational community and its principles on the one hand and their increasingly complex and politicized national roles on the other.

A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Cornell University Press 2000). A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Cornell University Press 2000).

Religion and Identity in Modern Russia: The Revival of Orthodoxy and Islam (Ashgate 2005). With Marietta Stepaniants and Benjamin Forest, ed.

Focusing on the roles of Russian Orthodoxy and Islam in constituting, challenging and changing national and ethnic identities in Russia, this study takes Tsarist and Soviet legacies into account, paying special attention to the evolution of the relationship between religious teachings and political institutions through the late 19th and 20th centuries. The volume explicitly discusses and compares the role of Russia’s two major religions, Orthodoxy and Islam, in forging identity in the modern era and brings an innovative blend of sociological, historical, linguistic and geographic scholarship to the problem of post-Soviet Russian identity. This comprehensive volume is suitable for courses on post-Soviet politics, Russian studies, religion and political culture.