Interview with Steven A. Barnes--October 19, 2010

Interview with Steven A. Barnes, Associate Professor of History at George Mason University. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on October 19, 2010.

Professor Barnes is the author of the book Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, which is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2011. Barnes is also the author of a website on the history of the gulag called Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives.

Interview Themes

How Barnes came to be interested in the gulag (00:57)
The evolution of Barnes's gulag project (04:12)
The argument of Barnes's forthcoming book and how it will likely be received (18:32)
Most interesting and exciting directions in Soviet historiography now (32:10)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/21953

Interview with Nikolay Koposov--October 7, 2010

Interview with Nikolay Koposov, research director at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland and former dean of the Smolny college of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Saint-Petersburg State University (1998-2009). Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on October 7, 2010.

Prof. Koposov has written on early modern France, approaches to history, and the politics of historical memory in Russia. His works have been published in French and Russian, including most recently a French translation of his 2001 book originally published in Russian, How Historians Think (De l'imagination historique).

Interview Themes

The contours of the historical profession in the USSR in the 1970s (01:49)
Koposov's path to the study of history (08:03)
Political implications of doing social history in the USSR in the 1970s (13:10)
Political shifts in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the 1990s as reflected in the historical profession (16:45)
Koposov's cohort of like-minded historians (26:24)
Retrospective perspective on the period preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union (28:33)
On the collapse of communism from a historian's perspective (32:33)
Hopes and apsirations for St. Petersburg State in the 1990s (38:30)
The fate of St. Petersburg State from its founding until now (42:23)
Scholars who influenced Koposov (49:32)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/21952

Interview with Elizabeth McGuire--September 30, 2010

Interview with Elizabeth McGuire, Ph.D. UC Berkeley (2010) and currently academy scholar at the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on September 30, 2010.

The title of Dr. McGuire's book manuscript is "The Sino-Soviet Romance: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with Russia, Russians, and the Russian Revolution."

Interview Themes

How McGuire came to her dissertation topic (00:43)

How the macro links to the micro in the history of the Sino-Soviet romance (03:14)

Practical challenges of writing transnational history across area studies boundaries (05:52)

McGuire's approach to narrative in her work (09:17)

The work of the historian in a post-area-studis world (11:33)

On training grad students to think transnationally (14:30)

Projects that can be undertaken with knowledge of Russian and Chinese (17:23)

Primary intellectual influences on McGuire (21:52)

To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/21951