Anna Krylova is Hunt Assistant Professor of Modern Russian History. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Russian and gender history, World War II and mechanization of warfare violence, Marxism, and historiographical and theoretical problematics of historical interpretation and writing.  It also engages with cultural, gender, and queer theory.

Her book Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, February 2010) explores the unprecedented historical phenomenon of Soviet young women’s en masse volunteering for combat in 1941 and writes it into the 20^th century history of women, war, and violence.  The book narrates a story about a cohort of Soviet young women who came to think about themselves as “women soldiers” in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s, got mobilized by the Soviet state between 1941 and 1945, and shared modern combat, its machines, and commanding positions with men on the Eastern front for four years.  The book’s focus is informed by the question of how Stalinist society merged the notions of violence, womanhood, and soldierhood, first, into a conceivable and, then, realizable agenda for the cohort of young female volunteers.  The book ends by positing the Soviet woman soldier as a critical subject of research, intricately connected not only to the peculiarities of Russian history but also to radical trends within Western feminist thought, women’s grassroots movements, and military experimentation of the mid-twentieth century. The book reaches across the scholarly fields of Gender History, Modern Russian and European History, and Military History.  It directly speaks to critical questions of current academic and popular debates about the mutability and variability of gender roles, the persistent enigma of individual life under Stalinism, and the meaning and place of violence in the construction of modern identity of the citizen-soldier.

Professor Krylova has been invited by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to collaborate on a CBC six-hour documentary series on World War II, to be broadcasted in Canada and France in the spring of 2010. The episode in which she appears as an expert narrator is devoted to Soviet World War II propaganda and Soviet women’s participation in combat.

In her current book project, “Traumas of Victory: A Cultural History of World War II in Russia,” Krylova combines modern Russian and European history, gender history, and military history in order to investigate the construction and meaning of traumatic experiences in different historical and cultural settings.  She explores a cultural history of the Soviet World War II experience as four public and individual traumas: a trauma of the Soviet defeat and demechanization of 1941; a trauma of the Soviet encounter with genocide in 1941-1942; a trauma of the encounter with the West; and a trauma of the cost of “Soviet victory”―27 million combatants and civilians dead. 

Most recently, she is the author of “Neither Erased nor Remembered: Soviet “Women Combatants” and Cultural Strategies of Forgetting In Soviet Russia, 1940s-1980s,” Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller, eds., Histories of the Aftermath: The European Postwar in Comparative Perspective (Berghahn Books, forthcoming, 2010) and “Identity, Agency, and the First Soviet Generation” in Stephen Lovell (ed.), Generations in 20th Century Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). She has also published articles in The Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 

In 2009-2010, Professor Krylova is directing the History Department Colloquium. She is a coordinator of the Triangle Intellectual History Program (Duke, NCSU at Raleigh, UNC at Chapel Hill) and also serves on the advisory board of the Research Triangle Seminar Series "History of the Military, War, and Society." She was a fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, 2005-2006 and a visiting professor at the Institute fuer Osteuropaeische Geschichte, Tuebingen University in 2002.  In 2008-2009, she was a recipient of the Franklin Humanities Institute/Mellon Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop Fellowship, Duke University, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.

Recent Talks and Presentations

“Mechanized Violence and Memory: World War II in Soviet/Russian Memoirs and Popular Culture,” paper presented at 2009 German Studies Association, Washington, October 8-11, 2009. 

“Between Marxism and the Nation: Global Imagination in Stalinist USSR,” paper presented at Duke-Durham University Symposium: “International Approaches to Historical Research,” September 10-11, 2009.

“Reconfiguring Soviet “Manhood” and “Womanhood” in the World War II Trenches,” paper presented at a Panel “Soviet Selves in and beyond Russia”/part of the Slavic Review Forum on Subjectivity; also presenter at two part round table “Gender, War, and Military History in Russia’s 20th Century,” 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Philadelphia, November 21, 2008.

“Partners in Violence: The Woman Soldier and the Machine in the 1941 Trenches,” Russian and East European Studies and Department of History, Manchester University, UK, 7 February, 2008.

“Writing Shared History of Violence on the Eastern Front, 1930s-1980s,” Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, UK, 6 February, 2008.

“Neither Erased nor Remembered: Soviet Female Combatants at the Home Front and in Postwar Popular Culture, 1940s-1980s,”International Conference “Histories of the Aftermath: The European ‘Postwar’ in Comparative Perspective,” University of California, San Diego, February 16-17, 2007.

“Women in Combat: A Stalinist Route to Non-Normative Heterosexuality, 1930s-1940s,” National Convention, 2007 American Historical Association, Atlanta, January 4-7, 2007.

“Organic Bolshevism, 1880s-1917,” International Conference “The Circulation of Knowledge and the History of Human Sciences in Russia and Soviet Union,” Centre d’Études des Mondes Russe, Caucasien et Centre-Européen, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, 26-27 May, 2006.

“Front Line Fighting as a Two-Gender-Affair: Female Combatants Remembering the War,” National Convention, 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Salt Lake City, 3-6 November, 2005.

“A Generation of Soviet Women-Fighters, 1930s-1970,”International Conference “Generations in European History,” New College, Oxford, UK, 8-10 April       2005.

Awards and Honors

Duke University, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Franklin Humanities Institute/Mellon Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop Fellowship, 2008-2009.

Named The Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History, Duke University, 2006-2010.

Post-doctoral Fellowship, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, 2005-2006.

IREX Short Travel Summer Grant, July-August 2001.

The Stulman Graduate Student, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University, August 1999.

Social Science Research Council Dissertation Write-up Grant, July 1998-April 1999.

IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Fellowship, September 1997-June 1998

Pre-Dissertation Fellowship Award, Association for Women in Slavic Studies, 1997-98.