Heather Bailey has a Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of Minnesota and has been teaching modern European and Russian History courses at UIS since 2002. She was the recipient of the University of Illinois system's University Scholar award in 2024. Her research focuses on the intellectual, cultural, and diplomatic relations between France and Russia in the nineteenth century. She has published extensively on negative attitudes about Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church in western European discourses. Currently she is writing a book on Anton Berezowski's attempt to assassinate Emperor Alexander II in 1867. This study examines the worldviews of, and dynamic relations and reciprocal attitudes between French citizens, Russians, and Poles in the aftermath of the affair. It is a comparative history that locates the Berezowski affair within the context of French and Russian political developments, criminal justice systems, the cosmopolitan revolutionary movement, Franco-Russian relations, and the Polish question in nineteenth-century Europe. It also explores discourses about political murder. 

Publications

Books:

The Public Image of Eastern Orthodoxy: France and Russia, 1848-1870 (Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell UP, 2020).

Orthodoxy, Modernity, and Authenticity: The Reception of Ernest Renan's "Life of Jesus" in Russia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).

Articles:

Eastern Orthodox Christianity, in Handbook of Religious Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe, eds. Anthony J. Steinhoff and Jeffrey T. Zalar, 15-34 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024).

Anti-Russian-Orthodox Discourses in the Trial of Anton Berezowski, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 6, no. 2 (2023): 159-80.

The churches that call themselves "orthodox": Nomenclature for Russian Orthodoxy in Nineteenth-Century France, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 2, no. 2 (2019): 149-77.

Roman Catholic Polemicists, Russian Orthodox Publicists, and the Tsar-Pope Myth in France, 1842-1862, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 53 (2019): 263-85.

A Russian Spectacle in Paris, St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2017).

Russian Interpretations of Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus, in Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth: Essays in Honor of Theofanis G. Stavrou, 147-55. Slavica Publishers, 2017.