Hoover Participants
Stanford Faculty
Stanford Graduate Students
- Simon Ertz
Invited Participants
- Golfo Alexopoulos
- Anne Applebaum
- Inga Arlauskaite
- Alan Barenberg
- Michael Ellman
- Anthony Garnaut
- Catherine Gousseff
- James Heinzen
- Emily Johnson
- Dina Khoury
- Donal O'Sullivan
- Silvo Pons
- Alexander Semyonov
- Victor Shih
- Felix Schnell
- Stephen Wheatcroft
- Kate Zhou
Golfo Alexopoulos is an associate professor in History at the University of South Florida. She received her PhD in Russian and Soviet History from the University of Chicago. Alexopoulos recently received a prestigious yearlong National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to support the completion of her book, A Gulag History: The Violence of Everyday Life. Based largely upon recently declassified Gulag archival documents, the work examines everyday life and practices in the Stalinist camps. At Hoover, she will continue her research using the Gulag archive collection and other private collections.
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate magazine. After graduating from Yale University, she was a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. In 1992, Applebaum won the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust award for journalism in the ex-Soviet Union. She is the author of Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (1995) and Gulag: A History (2003), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2004. At Hoover, she will continue her work on the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe using primarily Hoover Polish collections.
Inga Arlauskaite currently works at the Lithuanian High School in Moscow. She received her Master’s degree in European Studies from Vilnius University in 2008. She co-authored a book The Occupation Army in Lithuania in 2007, which analyzed Soviet occupation in Lithuanian territory. At Hoover, she will use the Radio Liberty and Voice of America collections for her research and dissertation on Western radio broadcasts to the Baltic States.
Alan Barenberg is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Texas Tech University. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2007. Barenberg specializes in the history of the Soviet Union, with an emphasis on the social and economic history of the 1930s-1970s. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Council on Library and Information Resources Mellon Fellowship for Dissertation Research in Original Sources in the Humanities (2003-2004) and a Social Science Research Council Eurasia Dissertation Fellowship (2005-2006). At Hoover, he will study the Gulag Archives to complete his book on the Vorkuta labor camp.
Michael Ellman is the Emeritus Professor of Economic Systems with special reference to Transition Economics and the Chair of the Department of Business Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1972 and became a full time professor at University of Amsterdam in 1978. Ellman is the author of numerous books and articles on transition economics, the Soviet and Russian economies, and comparative economic systems. In 1998, he was awarded the Kondratieff prize for his “contribution to the development of social sciences.” At Hoover, he will work on Fond 17 of the Soviet State and Party Archives, studying the Central Committee Plenums.
Anthony Garnaut is a researcher in Chinese history at the University of Melbourne. He received his BS in physics at Peking University. He has been a translation consultant for Lonely Planet Publications and authored the Lonely Planet Mandarin Phrasebook in 2004. In 2008, he joined a comparative history project on modern famines led by University of Melbourne professor Stephen Wheatcroft, in which his own work focuses on the economic history of China’s Great Leap famine (1958-1961).
Catherine Gousseff is a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and is affiliated with the Marc Bloch Center (French-German Center for Social Sciences Research). She is currently a research fellow at the Centre d’Etudes des Mondes Russe, Caucasien et Centre-Européen (Center for Studies of Russian, Caucasian and East European Societies) and the Institut d’Histoiore du temps present (Contemporary History Institute). She received her PhD from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 1996. She has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses at a variety of universities around Europe and has published several books on European history. Currently, she is finishing a book on population exchange between Poland and the Soviet Union at the end of and during the aftermath of World War I. At Hoover, she plans to use the Hoover Polish collections to do research for her book.
James Heinzen is an associate professor at Rowan University and teaches courses on Russian and European history. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include a cultural history of Russia and family history in Russia. He has written and been published on corruption in the USSR and written a book Inventing a Socialist Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia 1917-1929. At Hoover he plans to use the archives of the Soviet Ministry of Justice, Procuracy, and Supreme Court for his ongoing study of bribery and campaigns against corruption in the 1940s and 1950s.
Emily Johnson is an associate professor of Russian at the University of Oklahoma. Johnson holds her PhD in Russian Literature from Columbia University. Before teaching at Oklahoma, Johnson taught at Columbia University, Hofstra University, Drew University and Williams College. Her research interests include the Petersburg myth and text and the documentary heritage of the Soviet labor camp system. Her book, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Its Self: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie, was published by Penn State University Press in 2006 and won both the South Central Modern Language Association book award and the Antsiferov Prize for the best contribution to the study of St. Petersberg by a foreign scholar. At Hoover she plans to work primarily with the Arsenii Formakov fund in order to assemble a small volume on the letters that Formakov sent and received while interned in Soviet labor camps during and after World War II.
Dina Khoury is an associate professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University. She received her PhD in Middle East history from Georgetown University. She is currently working on a book, War and Remembrance in Iraq, which is being funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her book looks at the methods in which the Iraqi government under the Ba’ath regime tried to mobilize its citizenry and soldiers to support war efforts during the 1980s and 1990s. At Hoover, she will do research in the Hoover Ba’ath Party Archive.
Donal O’Sullivan is an associate professor in History at California State University, Northridge. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Bonn. He has published three books, including his most recent book, "Dealing with the Devil. The Anglo-Soviet Intelligence Co-operation During World War II." He has also published 20 articles and has received numerous awards including the 2008 Historians Award of the Erna Kronauer-Stiftung and the Friedwart-Bruckhause-Prize of the Hanns Martin-Schleyer-Foundation. At Hoover, he will use the recently acquired Lithuanian KGB archives to study nationalism, identity, and social change in post-war Soviet Lithuania 1944-1961.
Silvo Pons is a professor of Eastern European History at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He is also the director of the Gramsci Institute Foundation in Rome. Pons has published several books, including The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943-1953 and Stalin and the Inevitable War, 1936-1941. At Hoover, he will do research in Hoover archives on diplomatic history.
Alexander Semyonov is an associate professor of History and Political Science at Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, and Bard College. He received his PhD in Comparative History from Central European University. Semyonov is the co-founder and editor of Ab Imperio Journal, an international humanities and social sciences peer reviewed journal dedicated to the studies in new imperial history, and interdisciplinary and comparative study of nationalism and nationalities in the post-Soviet space. He has been an associate visiting professor at the University of Chicago (2010) and the University of Michigan (2009) and is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. At Hoover, he will use archives to trace the policy of liberals toward the problem of national self- determination, which links to his earlier research on Russian early 20th century liberalism in the context of empire. He also plans to use the archives to look closely at the moment of collapse of empire and Civil War, and how the earlier conflicts in the Kadet party played out during those periods.
Victor Shih is an assistant professor in Political Science at Northwestern University, specializing in Chinese politics. He received his PhD in Government from Harvard University. He is the author of Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation, published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Shih has also authored numerous articles appearing in academic and business journals, including The China Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, and The Asian Wall Street Journal, and is a frequent adviser to the private sector on the banking industry in China. At Hoover, he will study the Chiang Kai-Shek Diary and the KMT collection.
Felix Schnell teaches East European History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He received his PhD in 2004 from Bielefeld University. He is currently a Privat-Dozent (PD) at Humboldt University. His research interests include 19th and 20th century Russian history, and he is especially interested in the history of Ukraine and the historical sociology of violence, power, and governance in Russian and Soviet history. He has published two books, numerous essays, and his work has appeared in many journals and reviews. At Hoover, he plans to use the 1937 February/March-Plenum archives for a new research project as well as papers of Russian émigrés for his book about the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918.
Stephen Wheatcroft is a professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He received his PhD in Soviet Economic History at Birmingham University. Wheatcroft has spent time working and researching in the Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian State and Party Archives, the Moscow Institute of National Economics, Moscow State University, and the Institute of History of the Russian and Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He has been published widely on Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet social, economic and demographic history and has recently co-authored a major history of the Soviet Famine of 1931-3. At Hoover, he will use Soviet and Chinese Archives to continue his comparative analysis of Soviet and Chinese famines.
Kate Zhou is an associate professor in Political Science at the University of Hawaii. She received her PhD in Politics from Princeton University. Her research interests include the political economy of East Asia, Chinese economic development, Chinese business, globalization in East Asia, and the dynamics of transition from central planning to markets. She is the author of two books about China, How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People and China's Long March to Freedom: Grassroots Modernization. At Hoover, she will study the archives of the KMT party.
