Zoé Allen-Mercier
University of Turku, Finland | Sciences Po, France
Zoé Allen-Mercier is a doctoral researcher currently enrolled in the University of Turku (Finland) as well as in Science Po (France) through a cotutelle agreement. Originally from Quebec, Canada, she has completed a MA in Laval University (Quebec city) in History. The research then focused on human rights advocacy in the Soviet Union following the signing of the 1975 Helsinki agreements and its impact on Soviet foreign and domestic policies. In order to further pursue this research interest, she began in 2020 a doctoral project funded by the Kone Foundation. Her interests overall lie in Soviet history, Cold War history, borderlands studies, state-society relations, and critical discourse analysis.
Epp Annus
Associate Professor | Ohio State University | University of Tallinn, Estonia
Epp Annus is associate professor with Tallinn University, Institute of Humanities (Estonia); she also lectures at the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University (USA). Her recent books include Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (Routledge, 2018) and Coloniality, Nationality, Modernity: A Postcolonial View on Baltic Cultures under Soviet Rule, ed. by Epp Annus (Routledge, 2018). Her research interests include Soviet and post-Soviet Baltic cultures, postcolonial studies, environmental studies and phenomenology of everyday life. She is the author of two novels. Her full list of publications is available here.
David Brandenberger
Professor of History | University of Richmond
David Brandenberger has published on Stalin-era propaganda, ideology and nationality policy in journals like Russian Review, Kritika, Jahrbuecher fuer Geschichte Osteuropas and Noveishaia istoriia Rossii. He has written or edited a half-dozen books including National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Harvard, 2002); Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, co-edited with Kevin M. F. Platt (Wisconsin, 2006); Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Terror under Stalin, 1928-1941 (Yale, 2011); and a critical edition of the Short Course on party history entitled Stalin’s Master Narrative (Yale, 2019) that was co-edited with M. V. Zelenov. He has a critical edition of the USSR’s official 1937 History of the USSR in peer review and is presently writing a monograph on Stalin’s last political purge (the 1949 Leningrad Affair) and co-editing the purge-era diary of a high-ranking Ukrainian member of the USSR’s Politburo. Another project on the Soviet leadership’s struggle to formulate a new party program between the late 1920s and early 1960s has been mothballed since February 24.
Kateryna Burkush
Postdoctoral Fellow | Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
Kateryna Burkush is a social historian of the late Soviet Union. Her research focuses on seasonal labor migration within the Soviet system and the related issues of precarity, non-standard employment, and informality, as well as local history and culture of labor migration in the Ukrainian borderland region of Transcarpathia. She received her PhD from the European University institute in Florence in 2019. Since then, she held fellowships at the New Europe College in Bucharest and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and taught 20th-century history and the history of communism at the European School of Social and Political Sciences at the Catholic University of Lille. She is now a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where she works on the monograph based on her dissertation and develops a new project on water management in the post-World War II Soviet Ukraine.
Sarah Cameron
Associate Professor of History | University of Maryland | Princeton University (Davis Fellow)
Sarah Cameron is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park and a fellow at the Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies in fall 2022. She is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union. Her research interests include genocide and crimes against humanity, environmental history, and the societies and cultures of Central Asia. In 2022, Dr. Cameron was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Funds from the Carnegie Foundation will support her current book project, “The Aral Sea: Environment, Society and State Power in Central Asia.” The book will offer the first complete account of one of the twentieth century’s worst environmental catastrophes, the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Dr. Cameron is also the author of The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018), which examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of the 1930s. The book won numerous awards in the United States. It also provoked intense discussion in Kazakhstan where the famine remains a largely forbidden topic, in part due to Kazakhstan’s close relationship with Russia. Dr. Cameron received her PhD in history from Yale University.
Sam Coggeshall
Ph.D. candidate | Columbia University
Sam Coggeshall is a Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University in Modern European History with an emphasis on Russia and the Soviet Union. His research examines the Soviet Union within its international and inter-imperial context, focusing on the interaction between the Soviet Union and the British Empire in the interwar period. His dissertation examines how the everyday practices of local Soviet and British officials created borders and made territories in Eastern Europe, shaping national spaces out of former imperial regions.
Other research interests include the role of gender in the construction of imperial subjecthood, the history of avant-garde literary and artistic movements, Soviet cultural politics, Stalinism, and the effects of the Second World War.
Robert Geraci
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Robert Geraci is Research Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 1996 to 2019 he taught Russian history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Window on the East: Imperial and National Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Cornell, 2001; Russian translation Okno na vostok, NLO, 2013) on Kazan as a site of religious, pedagogical, and ethnographic approaches to the assimilation of Tatars and other minorities, and co-editor of Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Cornell, 2001). He has published numerous articles and book chapters, including “Pragmatism and Prejudice: Revisiting the Origin of the Pale of Jewish Settlement and Its Historiography” (Journal of Modern History, 2019). He is completing a monograph titled Imperial Bazaar: Ethno-National Diversity and the Trope of Russian Commercial Inferiority, which incorporates research in Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.
Wendy Z. Goldman
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of History | Carnegie Mellon University
Wendy Z. Goldman is a social and political historian of Russia. Her early work focused on family policy, women’s emancipation, and industrialization. She wrote about Stalinist repression in Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics of Repression (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and Terror in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2011). She has edited several volumes, including collections on Soviet workers, the ghetto in global history, and food provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II. Her latest work (with Donald Filtzer), Fortress Dark and Stern. The Soviet Home Front during World War II (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive study of the contribution of the Soviet home front to the victory in World War II. Her articles and books have been translated into Russian, Czech, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Japanese. Her work has received numerous prizes and awards. She is co-director of the Socialist Studies Seminar, jointly sponsored by CMU and the University of Pittsburgh, and the director of the CMU Prison Education Project.
Artemy Kalinovsky
Temple University
Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University. He earned his BA from the George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics, after which he spent a decade teaching at the University of Amsterdam. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.
Aleksandr Korobeinikov
Ph.D. candidate | Central European University
Aleksandr Korobeinikov is a doctoral student at the History Department of the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna and a research fellow at the Faculty of History and Cultural Studies of the Justus Liebig University Giessen. He is the author of several articles on the postimperial history of the Siberian native people. His current research focuses on the intellectual, environmental, and economic history of postimperial Yakutia.
Nikolay Mitrokhin
Research Fellow | Research Center for East European Studies | University of Bremen, Germany
Mitrokhin Nikolay (b. 1972 in Moscow), now is an associated academic fellow Research Center for East-European Studies at the Bremen university (Germany) (RCEES – Forschungsstelle Osteuropa) and author “Essays on Soviet economic policy (1965-1989)”, New literature Review, 2022. He took diploma Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU, Moscow) in 1995, Ph.D. in History in the RGGU, 2002. He worked at the Information and Research Centre “Panorama” (Moscow) in 1991-1999 and at the Memorial Human Rights Center (Moscow) in 1999-2005. He was a fellow of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2005-2006) and Gerda Henkel Foundation (2006-2008). In 2008-2014 and 2018-2022 as an academic fellow in RCEES. He is the author and co-author a few books in Russian – Bishops and Eparchies (Dioceses) of the Russian Orthodox Church (1997), Turkmenistan: State Policy and Human Rights (1999), Economic Activity of The Russian Orthodox Church (2000), Russian Party: The Russian Nationalist Movement in the USSR. 1953-1985 (2003, German edition – 2015), The Russian Orthodox Church: Contemporary Condition and Actual Problems (2004, 2006) and more than 100 academic publications about political and social history, ethnic and religious problems in the USSR and the CIS from 1953 through the present.
Beatrice Penati
Lecturer in Russian and Eurasian History | University of Liverpool, UK
Dr. Penati is a historian of Central Asia under Russian and Soviet rule. She specializes in the history of economic policies, taxation, agriculture, and the environment. Her most recent projects include a study of land reform, agrarian change, and political mobilization in early Soviet Uzbekistan, and a micro-history of the exploitation of Central Asian wormwood before the revolution. Other smaller projects concern the history of water, forests, statistics, land rights, nutritional standards, and theoretical debates about economic policy.
After a co-directed doctorate between the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (Italy) and the EHESS in Paris, Dr. Penati conducted research in Tashkent, at the Slavic Research Center of Hokkaido University (Japan), and as a Newton Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Manchester. She moved to Liverpool in January 2018 after four years teaching on aspects of Central Asian history at all levels (from survey to master’s) at Nazarbayev University (Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan).
At Liverpool, Dr. Penati splits her teaching time between modern Central Asia and Russian and Soviet history.
Tamar Qeburia
Ph.D. candidate | Ilia State University, Georgia | Georg-August-University, Göttingen, Germany
Tamar Qeburia is a PhD. Candidate at the Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt International doctoral program since November 2018, faculty of Eastern European History. Her ongoing PhD research – Work and everyday life in Late Soviet Georgia – explores the history of the Ferroalloy Factory located in the region of Imereti (West Georgia) by looking at the social, economic and material aspects of producing industrial space, generating working class and constructing scientific knowledge of production and industrial technology. In her research, she applies the bottom-up approach to reconstruct rather understudied aspects of Georgias’ Soviet history where socialist modernity met with nationalist awaking, the interest of local establishments diverged from the interests of the Soviet centre and thus, generated the new cultural and social characteristics of Late Soviet Georgian SSR. Her research and academic interests encompass Soviet history and the history of late Soviet time, labour history and everyday life history, Caucasus and Nationalism study. She earned her Master’s degree with distinction in Social Anthropology in 2016. Her working experiences consist of 5 years of policy research in the field of labour politics, extractive industries and workers’ movements of contemporary Georgia.
Jonathan Raspe
Ph.D. candidate | Princeton University
Jonathan Raspe is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. His dissertation explores industrial politics, society, and culture in the Soviet Union’s non-Russian republics after the Second World War through a comparative study of the Minsk tractor factory in Belarus and the Karaganda steel and iron works in Kazakhstan. He has previously conducted research on national identity and ethnic relations in the Soviet Union during the interwar period. His work has been published in Nationalities Papers and in the Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. Before coming to Princeton, he received an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies with Distinction from St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and a BA in History and Economics from the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research has been supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Claire Roosien
Assistant Professor | Yale University
Claire Roosien is Assistant Professor in the Yale University Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research focuses on the intersection of culture, politics, and empire in late imperial and Soviet Eurasia. Her first book-in-progress, Socialism Mediated: Culture, Propaganda, and the Public in Early Soviet Uzbekistan, examines how Central Asian cultural intermediaries imagined and mobilized mass participation through cultural production: poetry, novels, film, newspapers, and material culture, among other media. Drawing on published and archival sources in several Eurasian languages, she posits the category of the “state public” to describe the contested imaginaries of state control and public participation, which were particularly fraught along lines of gender and ethnicity. In her analysis, Socialist Realism emerges as a mode for public-formation, much as ego-documents have been examined as modes for the formation of a Soviet subjectivity. From this project, her article on the Red Teahouse as an institution of the state public in Central Asia appeared in Kritika in Summer 2021, and an article on textiles as propaganda for Central Asian women appeared in Central Asian Survey in Winter 2022. Other projects at the research stage examine the cultural construction of the Aral Sea as a disaster zone and race/ ethnicity in popular Soviet performance culture.
Sohee Ryuk
Ph.D. candidate | Columbia University
Sohee Ryuk is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “Weaving “Oriental Carpets” into the Soviet Union: Handicraft and Folk Art at the Intersections of Nations, Commodity, and Labor, 1890-1986.” In her dissertation, she uses carpets from Central Asia and the Caucasus as a lens to contextualize changes in labor organization and commodity production in the Soviet Union. Carpet weavers, scholars, and the state reimagined carpet traditions as they transformed trade and production networks to form national commodities.
Jeff Sahadeo
Professor | Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Jeff Sahadeo is professor at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865-1923 (2007) and Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (2019). He is the co-editor of Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present and the author of numerous book chapters and articles in journals that include Slavic Review and the Journal of Modern History. He is the incoming president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society.
Lewis Siegelbaum
Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History | Michigan State University
Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University where he taught Russian and European history from 1983 until 2018. He is the author of books on industrial mobilization in Russia during World War I (1984), the Stakhanovite movement of the 1930s (1988), Soviet state and society in the 1920s (1994), and the award-winning Cars for Comrades (2008). His memoir, Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian, was published in 2019 and a Russian edition was issued in 2020. In addition, he is co-author with Leslie Page Moch of Broad is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (2014). He has edited two books and co-edited six others, most recently Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands (2019) with Krista Goff. He also co-authored with James von Geldern the award-winning online sourcebook “Seventeen Moments in Soviet History.”
Andrew Sloin
Associate Professor of History | Baruch College, City University of New York
Andrew Sloin is an Associate Professor of Russian, Soviet, and Jewish History at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY). His first book, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power (Indiana University Press, 2017), which examines the relationship between economy, nationality and ethnicity in post-revolutionary Belarus, received the 2018 Dorothy Rosenberg prize from the American Historical Association. Currently, he is working on two book projects. The first, We Robot: Socialism, Automation, and the Machine Age, examines socialist fantasies of robotization and mechanization against the contested actuality of robotization and anxieties of automation under actually existing socialism in the late-Soviet era. The second project – Troubled Time: Socialism and the Yiddish Historical Imagination, 1871-1948 – examines the relationship between the writing of popular history in the transnational Yiddish public sphere and the development of socialism in the context of systemic global crisis.
Anna Whittington
Assistant Professor | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Anna Whittington is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she specializes in the history of citizenship, inequality, and demography in Soviet Eurasia. She is pursuing two projects. The first, Repertoires of Citizenship, is a book-length study on the discourses and practices of Soviet citizenship and identity, based on her 2018 dissertation at the University of Michigan. The second, A Mirror for Society, considers censuses and enumeration in the tsarist empire and Soviet Union. Both projects draw on multilingual research conducted in nearly three dozen archives and libraries in eight countries, as well as more than a decade of extensive work, travel, and study in the former Soviet Union, including 14 of 15 former Soviet Republics. She previously held fellowships at the Kennan Institute, the Davis Center at Harvard University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.