Jeffrey Brooks

Professor
Russian culture and politics 19th-20th century, Russian literature and History, Russian Popular Culture, Cold War

The Johns Hopkins University
Department of History
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore MD 21218

Telephone: 410-516-5217
E-mail: brooksjp@jhu.edu
            Brooksjef@gmail.com

Office Hours: Thursday 1:30-3:30pm

Curriculum Vitae

I am a cultural historian who specializes in modern Russian and European history, and the author of two books: Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000) and When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton, 1985), which won the Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies for the best book by an American in 1985. I am currently writing a book about the Russian engagement which the two great cultural phenomenon of the period from 1850 to 1950, aesthetic modernism and commercial popular culture. I have written many articles on subjects of Russian culture, politics and society and have received a number of important fellowships including a Guggenheim and, during the past year, a Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship in Washington.

I regularly teach general surveys of Russian history and a survey of modern European history. I also teach more specific courses related to my particular interests and research. These include a course on the politics of modern European art with Professor Vernon Lidtke and two courses about Russian literature and society.

Recent Publications:

Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War  (Princeton University Press, 2000, paperback edition 2001), 319 pp.

Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State: A Brief History with Documents.  Co-authored  with Georgiy Cherniavskiy. Bedford St. Martins); in Press.

When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917  (Reprinted with a new introduction by Northwestern University Press, 2003, 1985).

Recent Essays:

“How Tolstoyevsky Pleased Readers and Rewrote a Russian Myth,” forthcoming in the Slavic Review, fall, 2005, 1-30. 

“?????, ??????? ?? ?????? ?????, ???? ???????? ??????? ?? ?????” (People who do not read newspapers should be morally killed on the spot,” in Sovetskaia vlast' i media (Soviet power and the media)  St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, spring, 2005, 1-26.

“La Litterature Russe et la culture populaire,” in Histoire de la Literature Russe. Eds. M.M. Efim Etkind, Georges Nivat, and Ilya Serman (Paris: Libraire Artheme Fayard, In Press, 2005, 1-40.

“Declassifying a “Classic” (forum on N. S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat), Kritka: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 5, 4(Fall, 2004), 709-21.

“Stalin’s Ghost: Cold War Culture and U.S.-Soviet Relations,” in After Stalin’s Death: The Cold War as International History, eds. Klaus Larres and Kenneth Osgood, (Rowman and Littlefield, Harvard Cold War Series). In Press, 2005, 1-35.

“Stalin’s Politics of Obligation,” in special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol.4, No.1 (Summer 2003), 47-68 and also in Redefining Stalinism, edited Harold Shukman London: Frank Cass, 2003.

“Still above Ground,” review essay on Olga Velikanova, “Public Perception of the Lenin Cult Based on Archival Materials (Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter, 2001), Kritika, (Winter, 2003), 253-59.

“Il romanzo popolare in Russia: dalle storie di briganti al realismo socialista” (The Popular Novel in Russia: from Bandit Tales to Socialist Realism) in Franco Moretti, ed., Il romanzo, (volume II, Le fome), Einaudi, Torino 2002, 447-469.

Recent Book Reviews:

B. I. Kolonitskii, Simvoli vlasti I bor’ba za vlast’ (St.Petersburg: RAN, 2001), American Historical Review, summer, 2004.

Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity & the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 ( Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2002), American Historical Review, (Feb., 2004), 286-87.

Aleksandr Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii Rossiia I Amerika v travelogakh I Intertekstakh (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie), 2001. American Historical Review, summer, 2004.

Course Syllabus:

100.105 OCCIDENTAL CIV. 1789 TO THE PRESENT

Literature and Art in Revolutionary Russia

The Russian Imagination

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