Willard Sunderland, Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, has had a long-time problem. Since graduate school, all of his scholarly energies have been directed toward finding something that no longer exists — the Russian Empire. The Ellison Center and the History Department sponsored Professor Sunderland’s visit to the Jackson School, where he gave a talk to promote his new book “The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution.” Sunderland’s approach to analyzing the twilight of the Russian Empire, a land with tremendous cultural diversity, was to search through the space and time of a single life — that of the infamous Baron Ungern.