Authors

Alan Barenberg received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 2007. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of History at Texas Tech University. His book, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta, was published by Yale University Press in 2014. He is also the author of articles on various aspects of the Gulag and its relationship to Soviet society.

Artem Kravchenko has received his MA in public history from the University of Manchester/Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences in 2014. He is currently a staff member of the Public History Program at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. His research focuses on practices of history representation to teenage and children audiences in the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, as well as on the history of Soviet magazines for children.

Judith Pallot is Professor of the Human Geography of Russia at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research interests are in Russian “peasant studies” and the geography of the Russian peasantry past and present, as well as the carceral geography of Russia. Her most recent research has focused on women’s experiences of imprisonment and impact of imprisonment on prisoners’ families, which resulted in many publications, including her recent monograph coauthored with Laura Piacentini, Gender, Geography and Punishment: Women’s Experiences of Carceral Russia (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Ivan Peshkov received his PhD in development studies from Poznan University of Economics, Poland. He is currently an assistant professor at the Institute of Eastern Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. His publications include Etatyzm i przemoc w teoriach zacofania gospodarczego (Etatism and Violence in Economic Backwardness Theories), published by Wydawnictwo Wyższej Szkoły Bankowej in Poznan in 2004. His current research focuses on the political dimension of quasi-indigenousness on the Russian-Chinese frontier. He has carried out research оn the China-Russia-Mongolia border triangle and the main economic and historical processes that characterize this area.

Vladislav Pocheptsov received his bachelor’s degree in history in 2010 from Udmurt State University, where he majored in ethnology and regional studies. Pocheptsov studied issues of globalization and localization processes, cultural identity, and ethnicity in modern society. In 2008 he completed an academic internship at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and another one at the University of Algarve, Portugal, in 2009–2010. In 2014 he graduated from Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and received a master’s degree in public history from the University of Manchester. His thesis is titled “Myth as a Means of Historical Representation in the Films of Theo Angelopoulos.” Currently Pocheptsov works in the field of sociological and marketing research as the executive director of Research Innovation Center ProResearch, Moscow.

Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby received her PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from the University of Virginia. She is currently a professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Kentucky. She teaches Russian language, linguistics, and folklore. Her current research examines vernacular religion and folk legends in the postsocialist era. She is coauthor and editor (with Yelena Minyonok and Tatiana Filosofova) of the online digital archive and critical edition The Russian Religious Folk Imagination. She is the author of Village Values: Negotiating Identity, Gender, and Resistance in Urban Russian Life-Cycle Rituals (Slavica, 2008).

Irina Shcherbakova holds a candidate of sciences degree in philology and is the director of youth and education programs at the International Memorial Civil Rights Society, the director of the high school competition “People in History: Russia, 20th Century,” and editor-in-chief of the educational website “Uroki Istorii” (History Lessons) (www.urokiistorii.ru). She is a member of the Scientific Board of Trustees of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, Germany, and of the International Academic Board of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, Austria. Shcherbakova directs a number of joint Russian-German research projects in history; she was the curator for the exhibition Gulag: Traces and Testimonies (Germany, 2012–2014) that was jointly organized by the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation and the International Memorial Society. Her interests include problems of historic memory, oral history, memoirs, Soviet repressions, women in the Gulag, and social history. Shcherbakova is the author of over 300 publications in Russian and other languages. In 2014 she was awarded the Carl von Ossietzky Prize, named after the German 1935 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Vieda Skultans obtained her PhD in social anthropology in 1971 from the University of Wales. Her working life from 1971 has been spent at the University of Bristol, initially in the Department of Mental Health and later in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests lie in the fields of cross-cultural psychiatry, moral anthropology, narrative, and life histories. She has carried out fieldwork in India, Nepal, Latvia, and Ukraine. Among her publications are The Testimony of Lives: Memory and Narrative in Post-Soviet Latvia (Routledge, 1998) and Empathy and Healing: Essays in Medical and Narrative Anthropology (Berghahn Books, 2007). She is currently the director of a four-year project at the University of Latvia looking thematically and structurally at Latvian, Russian, and Romany life histories.

Sofia Tchouikina holds a PhD in sociology. She is an assistant professor at the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes–Saint-Denis. She is conducting research in the sociology of memory. Her research interests include the sociology of museums; public perceptions of museum exhibitions; commemorations, monuments, and memorial places in post-Soviet cities and towns; and the transmission of family memory. Her doctoral dissertation was devoted to the collective memory of noble families about their life in the USSR during the interwar period. Currently she is participating in a research project titled “Memory and Museums of the First World War: International Comparison of Museums’ Exhibitions” at the Institute for Social Studies of Politics in Paris.

Olga Ulturgasheva is a lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. She has participated in a number of international projects exploring human and non-human personhood, movement patterns, childhood and adolescence in Amazonia, Russia, and the American Arctic. She is the author of Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny (Berghahn Books, 2012) and coeditor of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia (Berghahn Books, 2012).

Andrei Zavadski graduated from Moscow State University of International Relations (MGIMO University) with a BA in regional studies (2009) and from Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences/University of Manchester with an MA in public history (2014). Starting in the fall of 2015, he will be a PhD candidate and member of the Emmy Noether junior research group on “Mediating (Semi-)Authoritarianism: The Power of the Internet in the Post-Soviet World” at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Free University of Berlin.