Earlier Ronald G. Suny amongst others served as the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History as well as Director of the Eisenberg Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Michigan. He was the first the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan, after beginning his career as an assistant professor at Oberlin College. He is a 2013 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Suny earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1968 for his study The Baku Commune, 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1972).