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Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe, by Larry Wolff, was published by Stanford University Press in January 2020. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allied powers met to reenvision the map of Europe in the aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson’s influence on the remapping of borders was profound. This book traces how Wilson’s emerging definition of national self-determination and his practical application of the principle changed over time as negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference unfolded. Wolff exposes the contradictions between Wilson’s principles and their implementation in the peace settlement for Eastern Europe, and  sheds light onRead More →

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Vladimir Sorokin’s Discourses: A Companion, by Dirk Uffelmann, was published by Academic Studies Press in April 2020. Sorokin emerged as a prose writer in Moscow’s artistic underground in the late 1970s and early 80s, and became visible to a broader Russian audience only in the mid-1990s, with texts shocking the moralistic expectations of traditionally minded readers by violating not only Soviet ideological taboos, but also injecting vulgar language, sex, and violence into plots that the postmodernist Sorokin borrowed from nineteenth-century literature and Socialist Realism. Sorokin became famous when the Putin youth organization burned his books in 2002 and he picked up neo-nationalist and neo-imperialist discourses inRead More →

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Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939, by Natan Meir, was published by Stanford University Press in July 2020. Memoirs of Jewish life in the Eastern European shtetl often recall the hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. In this work, Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society’s outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the drama of modernization. Jewish marginal folk were often made to bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in moments of crisis or asRead More →

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Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes: Architecture and Stalin’s Revolution from Above, 1928-1938, by Danilo Udovicki-Selb, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in May 2020. Conventional readings of the history of Soviet art and architecture show modernist utopian aspirations as all but prohibited by 1932 under Stalin’s totalitarianism. Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes reveals how the relationship between the Party and practicing architects was much more complex and contradictory than previously believed, and shows how the architectural avant-garde was able to persist at a time when it is widely considered to have been driven underground. In doing so, this book provides an essential perspective on how to analyze, evaluate, and “re-imagine”Read More →

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Roma Rights and Civil Rights: A Transatlantic Comparison, by Sunnie Rucker-Chang and Felix B. Chang, was published by Cambridge University Press in March 2020. Roma Rights and Civil Rights tackles the movements for, and expressions of, equality for Roma in Central and Southeast Europe and African Americans from two complementary perspectives: law and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book engages with comparative law, European studies, cultural studies, and critical race theory. Its central contribution is to compare the experiences of Roma and African Americans regarding racialization, marginalization, and mobilization for equality. Deploying a novel approach, the book challenges conventional notions of civil rights andRead More →

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Archie Brown authored The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, April 2020.) In this analysis of the role of political leadership in the Cold War’s ending, Brown shows why the popular view that Western economic and military strength left the Soviet Union with no alternative but to admit defeat is wrong. To understand the significance of the parts played by Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in East-West relations in the second half of the 1980s, Brown addresses several specific questions: What were the values and assumptions of these leaders, and how did their perceptionsRead More →

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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-1990, by Peter Reddaway, was published in February 2020 by Brookings Institute Press. In the last decades before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, dissidents within the country worked to expose the tyranny and weakness of the Soviet state. Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and came to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he tells their stories and also captures the human costs of the repression that marked the SovietRead More →

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Angelo Segrillo’s two books The Decline of the Soviet Union: An Analysis of the Causes and Russia: Europe or Asia? The Question of Russia’s Identity in the Discussions Between Westernizers, Slavophiles and Eurasianists and an Analysis of the Consequences in Present-Day Russia were recently released by the University of São Paulo.Read More →

Libora Oates-Indruchova’s book, Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89: Snakes and Ladders, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in May 2020. Oates-Indruchová explores to what extent censorship affected scholarly publishing in state-socialist Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and how writers responded to intellectual unfreedom. Divided into parts looking at the institutional context of censorship, the full trajectory of a manuscript from idea to publication, the author and their relationship to the text and language, this book provides insight into the ambivalent, beneficial, and detrimental effects of censorship on scholarly work from the Prague Spring of 1968 to the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The book also bringsRead More →

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Selling the Story: Transaction and Narrative Value in Balzac, Dostoevsky, and Zola, by Jonathan Paine, was published by Harvard University Press in August 2019. Paine, a literary scholar and investment banker, applies economic criticism to canonical novels, changing the way we read these classics and proposing a new model for how economics can inform literary analysis. Selling the Story shows how the business of literature affects even literary devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. Paine argues that no book can be properly understood without reference to its point of sale: the author’s knowledge of the market, of reader expectations, and of his or herRead More →