The work of Michael David-Fox, historian of modern Russia and Soviet communism, establishes and probes often unexpected connections: between culture and politics, institutions and mentalities, or domestic and international developments. David-Fox has published on a wide array of problems in Russian and Soviet history and culture, and he pursues strong interests in source criticism and historiography.

David-Fox is a Founding Editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

Published quarterly and edited in College Park since January 2000, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History continues in the tradition of Kritika: A Review of Current Soviet Books on Russian History, published at Harvard from 1964 to 1984. The title derives from the word for “criticism” in Russian.

Several regular features of the new Kritika set it apart from other journals, such as regular Forums, reaction pieces, and special issues that set agendas for further research. The journal specializes in lengthy, in-depth, analytical reviews, primarily of publications in languages other than English that are rarely if ever reviewed elsewhere in North America

Electronic version published by Project Muse, Johns Hopkins University Press, http://muse.jhu.edu

Kritika Website: http://www.slavica.com/journals/kritika/kritika.html

Books

 In progress: Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Russia, 1921-1941.

Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929. Ithaca: Cornell University Press and Studies of the Harriman Institute, 1997.
                                   
Co-edited with György Péteri, Academia in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe. Co-author of introduction and author of Chapter 3, “The Assault on the Universities and the Dynamics of Stalin’s ‘Great Break,’ 1928-1932.” Westport, CT and London: Bergin & Garvey (Greenwood Publishing Group), 2000. 352 pp. Paperback edition: Information Age Publishing, 2008

Editor, Amerikanskaia rusistika: Imperatorskii period [American Russian Studies: The Imperial Period]. Samara: Izdatel’stvo ‘Samarskii Universitet’ [Samara University Press, Russia], 2000. 331 pp. Author of  introductory article, “Otsy, deti, i vnuki v amerikanskoi istoriografii tsarskoi Rossii” [Fathers, Sons, and Grandchildren in the American Historiography of Tsarist Russia], pp. 5-47.

Editor, Amerikanskaia rusistika: Sovetskii period [American Russian Studies: The Soviet Period].Samara: Izdatel’stvo ‘Samarskii Universitet’ [Samara University Press, Russia], 2001.  375 pp. Paperback edition, 2001. Author of chapter “Sem’ podkhodov k fenomenu sovetskoi sistemy: Raznye vzgliady na pervuiu polovinu ‘kratkogo’ XX veka” [Seven Roads to the Soviet System: Views on the First Half of the ‘Short’ 20th Century”], pp. 20-44.

Co-edited with Peter Holquist and Marshall Poe, The Resistance Debate in Russian and Soviet History, vol. 1 of Kritika Historical Studies (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2003). Co-author of introduction and author of commentary piece, “Whither Resistance?”

Co-edited with Peter Holquist and Marshall Poe, After the Fall: Essays on Russian and Soviet Historiography after Communism (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2004), vol. 2 of Kritika Historical Studies. Author of introduction and afterword.

Co-edited with Peter Holquist and Alexander Martin, Orientalism and Empire in Russia (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2006), vol. 3 of Kritika Historical Studies. Author of "Editors’ Introduction: Russia’s Orient, Russia’s West." (pp. 3-19).

Articles and Book Chapters

“Annäherung der Extreme: Die UdSSR und rechtsradikalen Intellektuellen” [trans. of When Extremes Touch: Soviet Courtship of Radical Right-Wing Intellectuals], Osteuropa 59, 7-8 (2009): 115-124, for special issue on the 70th anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.

"Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,"Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 55, no. 4 (2006): 535-555.

"Leftists versus Nationalists in Soviet-Weimar Cultural Diplomacy: Showcases, Fronts, and Boomerangs," in Susan Gross Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia between the Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006): 103-158.

“Troinaia dvusmyslennost’. Teodor Draizer v sovetskoi Rossii (1927-1928): Palomnichestvo, pokhozhee na obvinitel’nuiu rech’ (Triple Ambivalence: Theodore Dreiser in Soviet Russia, 1927-1928. An Accusatory Pilgrimage), in Alexander Etkind and Pavel Lysakov, eds. Kul’turnye issledovaniia [Cultural Studies] (St. Petersburg and Moscow: European University and Letnii sad, 2006):290-319.

“Russian Universities Across the 1917 Divide,” in John Connelly and Michael Gruettner, eds., Universities Under Dictatorships (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005): 15-44 [revised and expanded version of German-language book below]

“The ‘Heroic Life’ of a Friend of Stalinism: Romain Rolland and Soviet Culture,”Slavonica, 11, no. 1 (April 2005): 3-29, special issue on “Across and Beyond the East-West Divide: Transnational and Transsystemic Tendencies in State Socialist Russia and East Central Europe.”

“Origins of the Stalinist Superiority Complex: Western Intellectuals Inside the USSR, 1920s-1930s,” National Council for East Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) Working Paper, 2004.

“On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (In Response to Martin Malia),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 81-106.

“Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr Arosev’s Literary and Political Depictions of Europe,” Slavic Review, 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 733-59.

“The Fellow-Travelers Revisited: The ‘Cultured West’ Through Soviet Eyes,” Journal of Modern History, 75, no. 2 (June 2003): 300-335.

“Das seltsame Schicksal der russischen Universitäten vor und nach der Revolution von 1917,” in Zwischen Autonomie und Anpassung: Universitäten in den Diktaturen des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Michael Gruettner and John Connelly (Würzburg: Schöningh-Verlag, 2002).

“From Illusory ‘Society’ to Intellectual ‘Public’: VOKS, International Travel, and Party-Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar Period,” Contemporary European History 11, no. 1 (February 2002): 7-32. Republished in Patronage, Personal Networks and the Party-State: Everyday Life in the Cultural Sphere in Communist Russia and East Central Europe
Trondheim Studies on East European Cultures and Societies (Trondheim, Norway, 2004).

“Masquerade: Sources, Resistance and Early Soviet Political Culture,” Trondheim Studies in East European Politics and Societies (Trondheim, Norway),  number 1, 1999. (See www.hf.ntnu.no/hist/peecs/issues.html).

“What is Cultural Revolution?” Russian Review 58, no. 2 (April 1999): 181-201.
“Mentalité or Cultural System: A Reply to Sheila Fitzpatrick,” Russian Review 58, no. 2 (April 1999): 210-211.

“Symbiosis to Synthesis: The Communist Academy and the Bolshevization of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1918-1929,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 46, no. 2 (1998): 219-243.

“The Emergence of a 1920s Academic Order in Soviet Russia,” East/West Education, 18, no. 2 (1997): 106-142.

“Science, Political Enlightenment and Agitprop: On the Typology of Social Knowledge in the Early Soviet Period,”          Minerva, 34, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 347-366. For special issue "Social Science under State Socialism."

(Co-authored with David Hoffmann), "The Politburo Protocols, 1919-40," Russian Review, 55, no. 1 (Jan. 1996): 99-103.

"Memory, Archives, Politics: The Rise of Stalin in Avtorkhanov's Technology of Power," Slavic Review, 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 988-1003.

"Political Culture, Purges and Proletarianization at the Institute of Red Professors, 1921-1929," Russian Review, 52, no. 1 (January 1993): 20-42.

"Glavlit, Censorship and the Problem of Party Policy in Cultural Affairs, 1922-1928," Soviet Studies, 44, no. 6 (November 1992): 1045-1068.

"Trotskii i ego kritiki o prirode SSSR pri Staline," [Trotsky and his Critics on the Nature of Stalin's USSR] Voprosy istorii, [Problems of History], Moscow, no. 11-12, 1992, 33-45.
        
"Ante Ciliga, Trotskii and State Capitalism: Theory, Tactics and Reevaluation during the Purge Era, 1935-1939," Slavic Review, 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 127-143. Published in Croatian translation in ?asopis za suvremenu povijest [Journal of Contemporary History], Zagreb, no. 3, 1994, 427-450.

Teaching

Prof. David-Fox teaches undergraduate courses that trace how core dilemmas—the need to “catch up” with the West, the need to create cohesion, the need to control dissent—played themselves out over time in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. David-Fox’s graduate students have worked on a variety of topics and have won departmental, university, and national awards.

Undergraduate courses taught:
History 344 (“Revolutionary Russia”)
History 408 seminars (“Intellectuals, Communism, and Fascism”); (Mythologies of the City: Petersburg and Moscow in Russian Culture”); (“Politics and Culture Under Lenin and Stalin”); (“Empire and Nationalism: The Case of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union”); (“Europe and the World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492 to Present)
History 425 (“Imperial Russia”)
History 442 (“Twentieth-Century Russia”)

Graduate seminars taught:

“Topics in the Historiography of the Russian Revolution”; “New Approaches and New Sources in Late Imperial Russian and Early Soviet History”; “Imperial Russia: Politics, Culture and Society in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”; “Late Imperial Russia”; “Soviet Communism and Its Transformations”; “Readings in Imperial and Soviet History”; “Russia and the West”; “Political Violence in Modern Europe”; “European History General Seminar” “Interpretive Problems in Imperial Russian and Soviet History.”

Education

Ph.D. Yale University, Department of History, 1993.
M.Phil. Yale University, Department of History, 1990.
M.A. Yale University, Department of History, 1988.
B.A. magna cum laude, Princeton University, Department of History and Program in Russian Studies, 1987.
full cv in a downloadable pdf file

Texts

English version of “Otsy, deti, i vnuki v amerikanskoi istoriografii tsarskoi Rossii” [Fathers, Sons, and Grandchildren in the American Historiography of Tsarist Russia], from Amerikanskaia rusistika: Imperatorskii period [American Russian Studies: The Imperial Period]. Samara: Izdatel’stvo ‘Samarskii Universitet’ [Samara University Press, Russia], 2000. 

"Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,"Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 55, no. 4 (2006): 535-555.

“On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (In Response to Martin Malia),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 81–105. 

“Stalinist Westernizer? Aleksandr Arosev’s Literary and Political Depictions of Europe,” Slavic Review, 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 733-59.

“The ‘Heroic Life’ of a Friend of Stalinism: Romain Rolland and Soviet Culture,” Slavonica, 11, no. 1 (April 2005): 3-29.

“The Fellow-Travelers Revisited: The ‘Cultured West’ Through Soviet Eyes,” Journal of Modern History, 75, no. 2 (June 2003): 300-335.