Russian History

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The University of Illinois has long been a center for Russian Studies and the Department of History offers a comprehensive and innovative graduate program in the study of Russian and Soviet history.

Courses offered in recent years cover the full range of Russian and Soviet history, often in a comparative perspective, and have emphasized the examination of major historiographical controversies, new methodological and theoretical approaches, and such key themes as the exercise and legitimation of power, industrialization and urban life, rural society, social conflict and cohesion, reform and revolution, intellectual and cultural movements, ideologies, gender and family, everyday life, popular culture, religion, ideas of nation and empire, and visions of the future. Graduate students in Russian history are also trained to ensure a strong grounding in comparative history and in historical methodologies and theory and to gain teaching and field research experience.

Students preparing preliminary examination fields in Russian history are encouraged to construct individual reading lists based on the preliminary exam reading list in consultation with the faculty.

The core faculty in the program include:

Diane Koenker - Also the Editor of Slavic Review, the primary national professional journal of Slavic area studies, Professor Koenker specializes in modern Russia and the Soviet Union and Russian and European working-class history.  Her current research focuses on everyday life and consumption in the Soviet Union. Her many publications include Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918-1930 (2005); Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (1989, with William G. Rosenberg); Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (1981); Eduard Dune, Notes of a Red Guard (1993, editor and translator, with S. A. Smith); and Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (1989, editor, with William G. Rosenberg and Ronald Grigor Suny).  She is working on a new book on tourism and vacations in the USSR, and an edited collection, with Anne E. Gorsuch, Turizm: Leisure,Travel, and Nation-Building in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the USSR (forthcoming 2006).

John Randolph specializes in Imperial Russian intellectual and cultural history, 1750-1850.  His forthcoming book, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism, shows how late eighteenth-century home-life opened a space in Russian culture for the ‘living through’ of the most radical--and productive--tradition of modern European philosophy: post-Kantian Idealism.  Part biography, part cultural history, The House in the Garden reinterprets the lives of famous Russian thinkers (not least among them the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin) by peering at their youthful activities in and around the Bakunin home. As such, the book reflects John’s enduring scholarly interest in the relationship between intellectual activity and the social spaces and practice that make it possible. John has articles published and forthcoming in The Russian Review, Gender and History, and Kritika. His essay “On the Biography of the Bakunin Archive” will appear in the collection Archive Stories (Duke University Press, Fall 2005) edited by Antoinette Burton.  John holds a Ph. D. in Late Modern European History from the University of California at Berkeley.

Mark Steinberg - Specializing on the cultural, intellectual, and social history of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Professor Steinberg’s research focuses on the cultures of the city, modernities, visuality, the experiences and worldview of lower-class Russians, and the development of moral, social, religious, and political ideas and values. Publications include Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907 (1992); Cultures in Flux: Lower Class Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (1994 - edited with Stephen Frank); The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (1995); Voices of Revolution, 1917 (2001); Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 (Cornell 2002); and the seventh edition of A History of Russia, with Nicholas Riasanovsky (Oxford, 2005). He is currently working on St. Petersburg and everyday modernities in the years between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.

Other faculty with expertise in Russian history include:

  • Donna Buchanan - (School of Music: Musical southeastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union (particularly Russia); nationalism in Russian and East European classical music; Mussorgsky; Shostakovich.)
  • Matti Bunzl - (Department of Anthropology: the Anthropology of contemporary central and eastern Europe (especially historical memory, nation-ness, ethnicity, gender and sexuality); Jewish Culture and History)
  • David Cooper – (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures: Czech, Slovak, and Russian literatures)
  • Jonathan Fineberg - (Art History Program: modern and contemporary Russian art)
  • Maurice Friedberg - (Emeriti; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures: Russian and East European Literature, Culture, and Politics; Slavic-Jewish cultural contacts)
  • Keith Hitchins - (Department of History: Eastern Europe, Central Asia, nationalities, empire)
  • Lilya Kaganovsky - (Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature: Soviet literature and film)
  • Carol Skalnik Leff - (Department of Political Science: Soviet and post-Soviet politics, nationalism, democratization).
  • Peter B. Maggs - (Law School: Russian law)
  • Jordana Mendelson - (Art History Program: Modern Russian/Soviet and Spanish art; avant-garde art)
  • Harriet Murav - (Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature: Russian literature, cultural history, Jewish intellectual history)
  • Robert Ousterhout - (School of Architecture: Byzantine architecture, medieval and ancient architectural history. 
  • Miranda Remnek – (Slavic and East European Library: imperial Russian history, especially readership and popular culture)
  • Valeria Sobol – (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures: 19th century Russian literature)
  • Olga Soffer – (Department of Anthropology: Archaeology of the Old World (with emphasis on the prehistory of the former USSR and Eastern Europe); hunter-gatherer adaptations; anthropological and archaeological theory).
  • Mary Stuart - (History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library: public library movements in Russia and the Soviet Union; comparative print culture).
  • Richard Tempest - (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures: Russian intellectual history)
  • Maria Todorova – (Department of History: Balkan history; nationalism; cultural images)

Graduate education in Russian history at the University of Illinois is further enriched through contacts with programs in other disciplines and at other Universities, participation of students and faculty in the biannual Midwest Russian History Workshop, by the diverse activities of interdisciplinary Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center (a Title VI National Resource Center), involvement in varied departmental and university colloquia and workshop (including the faculty-graduate Russian Studies Circle, or simply the Kruzhok), and by the presence of one of the premier Slavic Library collections in the country (and which also cosponsors a national Slavic Reference Service, summer national workshops, and series of lectures and conferences). Other important campus resources include The Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.

Dissertations Completed in Russian History since 1990

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  • Fanny Elisabeth Bryan, "State Efforts to Undermine Religious Allegiances: Themes and Arguments of AntiIslamic Propaganda during the Soviet Period," 1992
  • Charles E. Clark, "Doloi Negramotnost': The Literacy Campaign in the RSFSR, 19231927," 1993.
  • Elizabeth Jane Dennison, "Outcasts, Outlaws, and Outsiders: Exiled Russian Anarchists in the Interwar Years," 1993.
  • Laura Lynne Phillips, "Everyday Life in Revolutionary Russia: WorkingClass Drinking and Taverns in St. Petersburg, 19001929," 1993.
  • Daniel Peris, "'Storming the Heavens': The Soviet League of the Militant Godless and Bolshevik Political Culture in the 1920s and 1930s," 1994.
  • Sally West, "Creating Consumer Culture: Advertising in Imperial Russia to 1914," 1995.
  • Scott Wayne Palmer, "Modernizing Russia in the Aeronautical Age: Technology, Legitimacy, and the Structure of AirMindedness, 19091939," 1997.
  • William Reger, "In the Service of the Tsar: European Mercenary Officers and the Reception of Military Reform in Russia, 1654-1667," 1997
  • Heather Coleman, "The Most Dangerous Sect: Baptists in Tsarist and Soviet Russia, 19051929," 1998
  • Thomas Trice, The 'Body Politic': Russian Funerals and the Politics of Representation, 18411921," 1998
  • Susan Smith, "Genesis of a Public Sphere in Russia: Vladimir Province, 17851861," 2000
  • Jeffery Sahadeo, "Creating a Russian Colonial Community: City, Nation, and Empire in Tashkent, 18651923," 2000
  • Marjorie Hilton, "Commercial Cultures: Modernity in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1880-1930," 2003
  • Christine Varga-Harris, "Constructing the Soviet Hearth: Home, Citizenship, and Socialism in Russia, 1956-64," 2005