IU Bloomington: Russian and East European Institute

Maria Bucur, Associate Professor and John V. Hill Chair in East European History. My research and teaching interests focus on European history in the modern period, especially social and cultural developments in Eastern Europe, with a special interest in Romania (geographically) and gender (thematically). I began my intellectual journey by investigating the ways in which cultural producers and social policy makers tried to engineer the future during the first half of the twentieth century. This led to the publication of my first book, Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania. During that same year I published a volume co-edited with Nancy Wingfield, entitled Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present. With this second project, I began moving towards examining how various local communities and official state institutions in Eastern Europe tried to engineer the past, by constructing representations of wartime violence through monuments and commemorative processes. This project has become a book manuscript I am currently writing, entitled The Violence of Memory and Memory of Violence on the Edge of Europe. In addition to these books, I've also published a number of essays on on eugenics, philanthropy, the cultural history of the Great War, commemorations of World War II, and gender and war, and a recent book, again co-edited with Nancy Wingfield, entitled Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe. In addition to these specific projects, I am also co-editor of the yearbook Aspasia, a new peer reviewed periodical focusing on women’s and gender history in and from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. I am also serving as coordinator for the gender network of the European Social Science History Conference. I am president-elect of the Assocation for Women in Slavic Studies, and the chair of the AWSS Heldt Prize. For information about this competition, click here.

My teaching combines these specific research interests with broader pedagogical ones. Some of the courses I have taught recently include: The Idea of Europe (undergraduate); Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century (undergraduate/graduate); Nationalism in the Balkans, 1804-1920 (undergraduate/graduate); Women, Men, and Society in Modern Europe (undergraduate); Opposition, Survival, and Resistance in Communist Eastern Europe (undergraduate and graduate); Problems in East European Historiography: Graduate Colloquium; Cultural History: Graduate Seminar; and Cultural History: Memory and Culture (graduate). I am also the chair of the gender and sexuality field in the History department.

Selected Awards: I.U. Trustees Teaching Award (2006); Indiana University, Multidisciplinary Development Grant (2004); Indiana University, Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2002); National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant (2001); Fulbright-Hays, Faculty Research Grant (1999); I.R.E.X., Resident Research Grant (1995).

Ben Eklof, Professor of History and Education, is the author of Russian Peasant Schools (1986)) and Soviet Briefing (1990), and has edited numerous volumes, including The World of the Russian Peasant, Schooling and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, Russia's Great Reforms, Democracy in the Russian School: The Reform Movement in Education Since 1984, the highly acclaimed two volume A Social History of Imperial Russia (by Boris Mironov, two volumes, 2000), and most recently, Educational Reform in Post-Soviet Russia: Legacies and Challenges (London, 2005) to which he contributed two articles: "Teachers" and "Russian Education: The Past in the Present." His interests include: peasant village life and popular culture; education (both Imperial and Soviet/post Soviet), politics and society, and the Gorbachev era. He is currently revising a manuscript on "classroom practices" in Russia, which argues that a distinct "Russian/Soviet school culture" persisted throughout the twentieth century, and was highly effective in outcomes, especially given low per capita national investments in education. During the late Soviet era Eklof served as a consultant for the Russian ministry of education, and he has edited a newsletter on education in post-Soviet Eurasia. During his career at IU he has supervised more than a dozen PhD dissertations, and been on the research committees of another twenty five. In addition to traditional offerings in the History of Imperial Russia, he has taught colloquia on "Peasant Life" "Prisons and Incarcerations in Russian History," "Education in Russia"; as for undergraduate courses, he has taught "Last Tsar: Imperial Russia 1894-1917," "The Gorbachev Revolution," "Heroes and Villains in Russian History: Biography and Autobiography" and "War and Peace: Tolstoy's Russia in the Napoleonic Era."
E-mail username: eklof

Owen V. Johnson, Adjunct Professor in the History department, has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in eastern European history and mass media and made significant scholarly contributions to the field with his work on the development of the press in the Czech and Slovak lands, as well as Central Europe generally. His recent publications include “Media Legislation & Media Policy in Slovakia: EU Accession & the Second Wave of Reform” (with Andrej Školkay), Medijska istraživanja: Znanstveno-strucni casopis za novinarstvo i medije/ Media Research: Croatian Journal for Journalism & the Media 11:2 (2005) and a co-edited volume, Eastern European Journalism Before, During, and After Communism (1999), in which he was the primary author of a chapter entitled “The Roots of Journalism in Central and Eastern Europe.” He has also published a number of essays, such as "Solidarity For a While: The Fading Away of a Liberation Movement," East European Politics and Society 19:4 (Fall, 2005); “Failing Democracy: Journalists, the Mass Media, and the Dissolution of Czechoslovakia,” in Michael Kraus and Allison K. Stanger, ed., Irreconcilable Differences?: Explaining Czechoslovakia’s Dissolution (2000); “Losing Faith: The Slovak-Hungarian Constitutional Struggle, 1906-1914,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 22 (1998) and "Mass Media and the Velvet Revolution," in Jeremy Popkin, ed., Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives (1995). He is the author of Slovakia 1918-1938: Education & the Making of a Nation (1985). He recently spent a recent sabbatical year in Slovakia, working on research for a book on the relationship of media and nation in Slovakia in the twentieth century.
E-mail username: johnsono

Hiroaki Kuromiya, Professor of History, is interested in the history of the Soviet Union in general and in the history of modern Ukraine and modern Russia in particular. His major publications include Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928--1932 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s--1990s (Cambridge University Press, 1998; a Ukrainian translation, Svoboda i teror u Donbasi: Ukrains'ko-rosiis'ke prykordonnia, 1870-1990-i roky [Kyiv: Osnovy, 2002]), and Stalin (Profiles in Power) (Harlow, UK: 2005). He is currently working on books and essays on the Stalin period, spending much of his little spare time in various archives and collecting formerly "forbidden" information (written and oral) in Moscow, Kyiv, and elsewhere. His graduate teaching includes colloquia on "Russian Historiography from Karamzin to the Present," "Soviet History," and "Modern Ukraine: From Cossacks to Independence."
E-mail username: hkuromiy

Edward Lazzerini is a visiting Professor of Central Eurasian History, Assistant Director of IAUNRC and adjunct Professor of History. Prior to coming to Indiana University, he taught for thirty years on the faculty of history at the University of New Orleans. His research interests include the intellectual history of Turkic peoples of Central Eurasia, especially the Volga and Crimean Tatars, Bashkirs, and Azeris; the comparative study of empire in and around Central Eurasia since the 15th century (Russia, China, and the Ottoman Empire); the history of the Volga Tatar diaspora; and the local history of Crimea from the mid-18th century to 1930. His major publications include Russia's Orient (edited with Daniel Brower), The Chinese Revolution, and volumes 2-3 of the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History (editor).
E-mail username: elazzeri

Matthias B. Lehmann, Assistant Professor of History. I am a historian of early modern and modern Jewish history with a special interest in the history of the Spanish Jews and the Sephardi diaspora in the Mediterranean world. In my first book, Ladino Rabbinic Literature and Ottoman Sephardic Culture (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2005), I look at the transformation of Ottoman Jewry in the nineteenth century through the lens of popularized rabbinic literature written in the vernacular language of the Ottoman Sephardim, Ladino or Judeo-Spanish. This vernacular rabbinic literature, negotiating between perpetuating rabbinic tradition and addressing the challenges of modernity, provides a fresh perspective on the modernization of Ottoman Jewry and the complex role of the rabbis in this process. My current project, tentatively entitled Philanthropy and Identity in the Sephardi Diaspora, 1660-1860, looks at rabbinic networks and networks of support for the Jewish communities of Palestine in the Sephardi diaspora prior to the advent of European and European-Jewish international organizations in the second half of the nineteenth century. I studied at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Jerusalem, and did my graduate work at Freie Universität Berlin and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid. I am teaching courses on early modern and modern European and Mediterranean Jewish history.
E-mail username: mlehmann

Alexander Rabinowitch is Emeritus Professor of History. His research has focused primarily on the revolutionary and civil war eras in Russian history. He has written or edited six books and his many essays have appeared in scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers in this country and abroad. Many of his most recent essays were initially published in Russia. Among his major works is The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd. It was the first major Western work on the October Revolution translated and published in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and it has also been published in Serbo-Croation, Italian, and British editions. A new Russian edition was published in 2003, in connection with the 300th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg and a new joint American and British edition of the book will be published later this year. Rabinowitch has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, Fulbright-Hays, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a member of The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Senior Fellow at the Harriman Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Columbia University, and the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is currently completing a study of politics and society in Petrograd during the first year of Soviet rule based largely on research in Petersburg and Moscow historical archives. His close to 20 former doctoral students teach at colleges and universities throughout the United States. An active member of the History Department and of the Russian and East European Institute, Rabinowitch is currently directing the thesis research of several doctoral candidates.
E-mail username: arabinow

David L. Ransel is Robert F. Byrnes Professor of History, Director of the Russian and East European Institute, and Co-Director of the European Union Center at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his B.A. from Coe College (Cedar Rapids, IA), M.A. from Northwestern University, and Ph.D. from Yale University (1969). He taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1967 to 1985 before moving to Indiana. He has served as editor of Slavic Review (1980-85) and editor of the American Historical Review (1985-1995) and in these capacities sat on the Board of Directors and Finance Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) and the Governing Council and Finance Committee of the American Historical Association. He was president of the AAASS in 2004. Professor Ransel is a specialist on the history of politics, society, and family in Russia. His major scholarly contributions include The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (Yale 1975), a study of family and clientele influences in Russian politics. He produced and edited The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research (Illinois, 1978), the first collection of essays on Russian family life. His second monograph, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton 1988) treated state responses to pathologies of family life and opened the field of the history of charity in Russia. He followed this with studies of village life, including the reconstruction of an ethnography focusing on peasant women and children, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia (Indiana 1993) and another major monograph, Village Mothers: Three Generations of Change in Russia and Tataria (Indiana 2000), a book based on oral testimony collected from over 100 village women throughout Russia. Ransel also published, together with Jane Burbank, an edited collection, Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, which sought to reconceptualize imperial Russian history after the fall of the Soviet Union. He has a new book, edited with Bozena Shallcross, titled Polish Encounters, Russian Identity (Indiana University Press, 2005), a collection of essays on historical, literary, and cultural connections between Russia and Poland. Ransel has also published several dozen articles on these and related topics. He is currently at work on two projects: a study of personal and social identity based on the life of an eighteenth-century Russian provincial merchant family, and a study of the allegiance to key social institutions of two generations of workers in the industrial suburbs of Moscow, based on oral testimonies. He works with students in the graduate history and anthropology programs on projects in political, social, oral history, and gender.
E-mail username: ransel

Toivo Raun, Professor of Central Eurasian Studies and Adjunct Professor of History (Ph.D., Princeton University), was appointed in 1990. A past president of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, he teaches courses on Baltic, Finnish, and Scandinavian history; Estonian culture; the Uralic peoples; and ethnic and imperial issues in modern Russian history. His current research interests include: Cultural survival and national identity: the Baltic case; rise and impact of literacy in the Baltic region; comparative levels of development in the interwar Baltic states and Finland. Raun has published on a wide range of topics in Baltic and Finnish history. He is co-author (with Edward C. Thaden, et al.) of Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), and his Estonia and the Estonians, first published in 1987 by Hoover Institution Press at Stanford, appeared in an updated second edition in summer 2001. The latter work has also been translated into Finnish (1989) and Hungarian (2001).
E-mail username: raunt

Jeffrey Veidlinger is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, and Associate Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program. His first book, The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, received a National Jewish Book Award, the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine. He is currently working on a book entitled Jewish Public Culture in Late Imperial Russia. The book examines the means by which Jewish voluntary associations, such as drama circles, literary clubs, historical societies, folk music societies and even fire brigades, helped define Jewish cultural identity within the Russian Empire. He is also co-directing the Indiana University Yiddish Ethnographic Project, which collects videotaped oral histories of Yiddish-speakers in Ukraine about Jewish life in the region before the Second World War. Professor Veidlinger teaches courses in Jewish History and Russian History.
E-mail username: jveidlin