Yale University, PhD '90

BIOGRAPHY

Amy Dru Stanley is a historian of the United States, with particular interest in law, capitalism, freedom and unfreedom, human rights, the relationship between the household and economic life, and the historical experience of moral problems. Her work has appeared in scholarly books and journals, as well as in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent, Slate, and Jacobin. She has received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring. In 2018, she was the jury chair for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Yale University, PhD '09

BIOGRAPHY

I am an historian of modern Russia, with a special interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century politics, culture, and ideas. My work explores how Russia's peculiar political institutions—and its status as a multiethnic empire—shaped public opinion and political cultures. It also interrogates Russia's relationship with the outside world, asking where the Russian experience belongs in the broader context of European and global history. In addition, I am interested in the theory and practice of the digital humanities.

My most recent book, Utopia’s Discontents: Russian Exiles and the Quest for Freedom, 1830–1930, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. It is the recipient of the 2022 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize from ASEEES, which recognizes the most important contribution in any discipline of Slavic studies. The book provides the first synthetic account of Europe's "Russian colonies"—boisterous and politically fractious communities formed by exiles from the Russian empire that emerged across the continent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book treats the "Russian colonies" as utopian communities in which radical activists worked to transform social relations and individual behavior, and it explores how these unique spaces influenced Russian political imaginaries as well as the culture of their host societies. Ultimately, the project offers a bold reassessment of Russia's relationship with Europe, the origins of the Russian revolution, and the creation of the Bolshevik regime.

My first book, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation, was published by Cornell University Press in 2013 and released in paperback in 2017. Children of Rus' argues that it was on the extreme periphery of the tsarist empire—a region that today is located at the very center of the independent nation of Ukraine—that Russian nationalism first took shape and assumed its most potent form. The book reconstructs how nineteenth-century provincial intellectuals came to see local folk customs as the purest manifestation of an ancient nation that unified all the Orthodox East Slavs, and how they successfully propagated their ideas across the empire through lobbying and mass political mobilization. In addition, it reconceptualizes state-society relations under tsarism, showing how residents of a diverse and contested peripheral region managed to shape political ideas and identities across Russia—and even beyond its borders. Children of Rus' was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013.

I am currently working on a new history of the origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion written for a popular audience. This book offers a new account of how this notorious text came to be, and it asks what history's greatest conspiracy theory can tell us about the present moment, when conspiratorial thinking is again on the rise in society and politics.

My current research is enriched by technology, and I am interested in thinking through how historians can use digital tools to open new avenues for exploration and to communicate their findings to other scholars and the general public. I am particularly interested in using geo-spatial analysis to analyze flows of people, ideas, and commodities over time and across space. For examples of my (ongoing) work in digital cartography, see my Utopia's Discontents website in development and my study of émigré publications.

I have held research fellowships at Columbia, Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. My research has been funded by ACLS, IREX, Fulbright-Hays, and the NEH.

I am represented by Kathleen Anderson (kathleen@andersonliterary.com) of Anderson Literary Management.

University of California, Berkeley, PhD '15

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of German cultural and intellectual life in the modern period. My research and teaching center on material culture, the history of museums, and the history of aesthetics.

My first book, The God Behind the Marble: The Fate of Art in the German Aesthetic State (University of Chicago Press, 2024) is a history of German cultural politics and aesthetics during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. It tells this story through Germans’ engagement with the French looting of European art collections, a Kunstraub [‘art robbery’] that challenged the faith that art offered a powerful source of societal liberation in a period of revolutionary violence. By following conflicts over the ownership, interpretation, conservation, and exhibition of objects, the book argues that the world of arts administration at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a ground of struggle over the powerlessness of art to convey political meaning, a struggle with lasting consequences for how we understand the modern public museum of art. In addition to the monograph, two additional essays draw on this research: “The Honor of the Trophy: A Prussian Bronze in the Napoleonic Era” in The Things They Carried: War, Migration and Material Culture, ed. Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); and “Lüdwig Völkel’s Sababurg List: An Inventory of the Public Museum of Art,” in Taking Stock: Media Inventories of the German Nineteenth Century, eds. Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, and Petra McGillen (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming).

I am currently at work on two projects which shift my focus from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both forward and backwards in time. The first, Postwar Premodern: A Baroque History of Germany after 1945 investigates how the artistic and craft traditions of the baroque period became political, personal, and aesthetic resources for making sense of the future of German society amidst the proliferating critiques of modernity in the wake of Nazism and the Holocaust. Rather than looking at historical preservation, my research is focused on episodes of historical re-use, in which a premodern past became a consumable utility for the reconstitution of German society in east and west. Chapters focus on the reuse of buildings, the restitution of art collections, the recreation of cabinets of curiosity, the study of early modern statecraft, and postwar typographical and handwriting reforms. An initial case study from this project was published as "The Splendor of Dresden in the United States, 1978-79” Representations 141, no. 1 (Winter 2018).

A branch of this book has turned into a separate project of its own about the restitution of European church bells after 1945. During the Second World War, the National Socialist regime requisitioned bells from across German and German occupied territory to be melted down and recast as armaments. This study of the many thousands of bells, largely from before 1800, that remained at the war’s end in depots in Hamburg and across northern Germany engages the fields of sounds studies, material cultural studies, history of religion, legal history, and memory studies to show how bells became tools of Cold War politics, and complex sources of cultural historical identification in the postwar world.

 I received my PhD in History from the University of California Berkeley, and hold an MSI in Archives and Records Management from the University of Michigan and a BA from Bryn Mawr College. From 2015-2017, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan in the Departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures. My research has been funded by the Neubauer Collegium and the Center for International Social Science Research at the University of Chicago, the American Academy in Berlin, the Mabel Mcleod Lewis Foundation, the DAAD, and the Council for Library and Information Resources.

NEWS

On February 12, 2024 from 6:00-7:00pm, I will discuss my new book, The God Behind the Marble. I will be joined in conversation by Catriona MacLeod. RSVP HERE 

Histories of Culture in Disastrous Times, research project with Jennifer Allen at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Received a 2024-2025 CISSR grant for the European church bell project

University of California, Berkeley, PhD '10

BIOGRAPHY

I specialize in the history of modern Russia and the Soviet Union, with a particular interest in Soviet culture, society, and their international context. Currently, I am at work on two book projects.

The first, Weary Sun, explores the history of tango, its creators and audiences, in Stalinist Russia and Eastern Europe. Soviet tango was made in Riga and Warsaw. Struck by the connections and exchanges between Soviet and émigré cultures, I focus on the largely unexamined Russian-speaking communities at the borders of the Soviet Union. Tango occupied a central place in the Soviet aural world, yet it fits uncomfortably in the dominant narratives and thus calls for a rethinking of Stalinist culture. This research reconstructs the sounds of Soviet courtyards, communal apartments, southern resorts, movie theaters, and parks of "rest and culture," where people encountered the tango most frequently. I seek to explain tango’s aesthetic and ideological work among other representations of socialist paradise.

Another project, The Entangled Histories of Soviet Newspeak and the Russian Language in the Twentieth Century, describes the rise and fall of Soviet newspeak as a language intricately bound to the daily uses and reforms of Russian itself. I see the Russian language as a field for defining social status and cultural authority in a post-revolutionary world. Multiple players were active in this field, including ordinary speakers of Russian and writers who experimented with the vernacular. 

My first book, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Harvard, 2018), is a history of the Soviet opening to the West during the 1950s and 1960s. The book investigates why and how Western cultural imports arrived in the Soviet Union on an unprecedented scale, as well as what meanings they acquired for Soviet audiences. To See Paris and Die brings together the ideas that justified cultural exchange and the diplomatic negotiations that made it possible, the secrets of museum storage rooms and the publicity of radio broadcasts, lavish international film festivals and backwater countryside screenings, enormous print runs and home-made books, state-sponsored travel and emigration. Analyzing how the Soviets received Western novels, paintings, and films, the book takes translation as its central theme — a mechanism of cultural transfer, a method of habituation of foreign imports, and a metaphor for transnational interactions. When they first appeared en masse, Western imports were extraordinary, but in the process of cross-cultural transfer that began in the mid-1950s, the foreign became quotidian—an indiscernible part of late Soviet culture and daily life. 

My research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennan Institute, the American Philosophical Society, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Social Science Research Council, American Councils for International Education, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Foundation, and the Fulbright-Hays program, among others.

Harvard University, PhD '05

BIOGRAPHY

A deep and abiding interest in the interactions between Asian Americans and African Americans drives my first book manuscript. Focusing primarily on the home front culture of World War II, but utilizing the necessary bookends of the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Cold War of the 1950s, my monograph interrogates the ways in which different racialized and ethnic groups interacted during a heightened sense of possibility for an American multiracial democracy. Unpublished diaries of incarcerated Japanese American, Charles Kikuchi, serve as a narrative through-line for the manuscript—he wrote every day of his life, from the bombing of Pearl Harbor until his death in 1988. While Kikuchi can be considered one of a handful of radical Nisei (second-generation) intellectuals consumed by the constitutional violation of Japanese Americans, he was most deeply concerned with the welfare of African Americans and other oppressed minorities. Recognition of their equality by the rest of the nation would prove key to the fulfillment of democracy at home and abroad. My book therefore considers prototypes for Kikuchi, like Karl Yoneda, a highly visible Communist Party member during the Popular Front, intellectual mentors during the war, such as immigrant activist Louis Adamic, W.I. Thomas, and Dorothy Thomas, social scientists associated with, respectively, the Chicago school of sociology and Japanese evacuation and resettlement study, and “everyday people,” from African Americans on the South Side of Chicago to Filipino migratory farm laborers in central California. The Cold War closes off some of the interracial and democratic possibilities of this fertile intellectual era, but not before a constellation of radical counterpublics appear on the national and international maps. A cartography of this period, therefore, demonstrates not only the importance of reexamination of the Kikuchi diaries, but also the efforts and limits of these particular publics to repossess, reclaim, and redefine American democracy.  

I have been honored to be a dissertation fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to Chicago, I taught at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and most recently, the University of Michigan.

University of Chicago, PhD '75

BIOGRAPHY

My research and teaching focus on the history of modern Europe, especially on the states, the peoples, and the societies of Central Europe since 1700. My special teaching interests are German history from 1740 to 1918; the history of the Hapsburg Empire between 1648 and 1918, and the history of Austria from 1918 to the present; religion and politics in modern European history; and the history of European and American universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In recent years my work has dealt with the history of the University and with the history of the Habsburg Empire and Republican Austria.  I published The University of Chicago: A History (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and I have recently completed the Austria, 1867–1955 volume for the Oxford History of Modern Europe series, published by Oxford University Press in late 2022. 

I am now working on a history of Religion and Politics in Modern European History from 1789 to 1960 for Princeton University Press. 

With Jan E. Goldstein and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, I am also an editor of The Journal of Modern History.

Brown University, PhD '88

BIOGRAPHY

The primary national focus of my research is modern France, but I have found myself intrigued by research problems best treated transnationally. My most recent book, Cultural Revolutions, moves across the Atlantic world from Britain, to colonial and early national America, and finally eastwards again to France. My ongoing pair of projects, Strangers at Home and Conundrums of Commemoration, stay on the European continent but involve a comparative analysis of Paris and Berlin in the twentieth century. Finally, although I have not yet published extensively in this area, I maintain an active interest in and regularly teach the history of European colonialism and the postcolonial world it left behind.

Conceptually, my work focuses on the intersection of material culture, everyday life, and politics. I seek to explain how and why everyday things have become catalysts for conflict, means of expressing identities and constructing selves, vehicles for dissenting opinions, and sites of unexpected state intervention. My research agenda is based on the hypothesis, informed by phenomenology and feminist theory, that key to answering these questions is the close and careful study of material culture, but a close and careful study that always links the concreteness of everyday goods to the abstractions of polity, society, and economy.

Although the courses I offer are necessarily broader and more general than this research agenda, they have been systematically informed by it. I use material and well as visual and textual sources in virtually all my classes, and nearly all are transnational in reach.

TEACHING

Undergraduate courses (selected)

• Problems in Gender Studies

• Europe 1930 to the present

• Colonizations Civ III

• Jewish Civ III

• Modern Jewish History

• Cultural Revolutions

Graduate courses (selected)

• Seminar: Religion, Politics and Society in Modern Europe (with John Boyer)

• Everyday Life in Modern Europe (with Sheila Fitzpatrick)

• Seminar: The Politics of Memory in France and Germany (with Michael Geyer)

• Gender in Europe (with Susan Gal)

• Seminar: Race, Racism and and Anti-Racist Movements in Modern Europe

Recent fields for general examinations

• Modern European History

• Modern French History

• Gender History and Theory

• Culture and Politics in Modern Europe

• European Social History

Titles of some recent (or current) AB and AM theses and PhD dissertations

• Islam and the Republic: A Study of the Effects of the Algerian Civil War on French Understandings of Islam

• Female Action and the Closing of the Women’s Clubs during the Reign of Terror

• War Relic: Revisiting the Leaning Virgin of Albert

• Working Class Milieus under Attack: Struggles between the Left and Right in Leipzig and Lyon, 1929–1936 (co-chair with Michael Geyer)

• The Evolution of French Abolitionism and the Memories of the French and Haitian Revolutions, 1815–1848

• The Ground Beneath their Feet: Agricultural Industrialisation and the Remapping of Rural France, 1954–1976

• Making Islam French Unsettling French Algeria: Settlement, Terror, and Violence in the French-Algerian War, 1954–1962.

• The Permanent Souvenir: Tattoos and Travel from Banks to Barnum Cultivating the Nation, Refining Empire: Wine, Sugar, and Nation-building in Guadeloupe and the Aude, 1880–1910

• The Imperialism of Un-Free Trade: Nineteenth Century British Wine-Trading Enclaves in Oporto, Madeira, and Andalusia

• Writing Black, Talking Back: Consuming, Performing, and Selling Race in Postwar France, 1945–1968

• From Children to Citizens: Republican and Catholic Primary Education in France, 1880–1914

• Fashioning the Folk: The Production and Reproduction of Alsatian Traditional Dress, 1871–1939

• The Rebirth of the Mediterranean: Migrants, Race, Nation, and Labor in the Western Mediterranean, 1914–1940

• Pale Fire: Jews in Revolutionary White Russia, 1917–1929 (cochair with Sheila Fitzpatrick)

• Selling Paris: The Real Estate Market and Commercial Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Capital