Anna Krylova
| Title: | Assistant Professor |
| Office Location: | 209 Carr Building |
| Office Phone: | (919) 684-3871 |
| Email Address: | krylova@duke.edu |
- Office Hours:
- Wednesday, Friday 1.15 pm - 2.30 pm
Education
- PhD Johns Hopkins University, 2001
- MA in History The Johns Hopkins University, 1998
- MA in Political Science The Johns Hopkins University, 1995
Research Interests
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 20th
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 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, “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, “Writing Shared History of Violence on the
Eastern Front, 1930s-1980s,” Centre for Russian and East European Studies, “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,” “Women in Combat: “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, 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. 
- HISTORY 105S.03, GATEWAY SEMINAR
Synopsis
- Carr 106, Th 03:05 PM-05:35 PM
- HISTORY 114A.01, END OF RUSSIAN SOCIALISM
Synopsis
- Biddle 101, WF 11:40 AM-12:55 PM
- HISTORY 135A.01, EUROPE IN TWENTIETH CENT
Synopsis
- Carr 103, WF 10:05 AM-11:20 AM
- HISTORY 182.01, PUTIN'S RUSSIA
Synopsis
Recent Publications
Papers Published- A. Krylova. "“Neither Erased nor Remembered: Soviet “Women Combatants” and Cultural Strategies of Forgetting In Soviet Russia, 1940s-1980s"." Histories of the Aftermath: The European Postwar in Comparative Perspective (forthcoming 2010).
- A. Krylova. "Identity, Agency, and the First Soviet Generation." Stephen Lovell (ed.), Generations in 20th Century Europe (2007).
- A. Krylova. "Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women Soldiers in 1930s Stalinist Russia." Gender and History (November, 2004). [pdf]
- A. Krylova. "’Dancing on the Graves of the Dead’ or Building a World War II Memorial in Post-Soviet Russia." Memory and The Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (2004).
- "Beyond the Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm: 'Class Instinct' as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis." Slavic Review (Spring, 2003). [pdf]