Anna Krylova is Associate Professor of Modern Russian History. Her research and teaching interests are in twentieth-century Russian history, state and society in contemporary Russia, World War II and mechanization of warfare, transnational communist women’s movements, Marxism, and problematics of historical interpretation and writing in gender and cultural history.
In addition to articles and book chapters, she is the author of Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2010) which won the 2011 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. Soviet Women in Combat rethinks the role that the modern state, in its democratic and autocratic/communist incarnations, plays in shaping societal gender roles. It offers a novel conceptual framework to engage the meaning and place of violence in the construction of modern identity and historical mutability and variability of gender norms. Her article “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies” which appeared in the first Winter 2000 issue of Kritika has since been used in graduate courses. The article is an attempt to grasp the metahistory of US Soviet and Russian studies through the conception of “Soviet man” in American scholarly writings and popular culture.
| Office Location: | 209 Carr Building |
| Office Phone: | (919) 684-3871 |
| Email Address: | |
Teaching (Fall 2012):
| PhD | Johns Hopkins University | 2001 |
| MA in History | The Johns Hopkins University | 1998 |
| MA in Political Science | The Johns Hopkins University | 1995 |
Her new book project A History of the Soviet: The Lingua Franca of Soviet Modernity sets out to question a longstanding convention, in and outside academia, that has allowed scholars to conflate in their work such basic cultural categories of modern Russian history as the “Soviet,” the “Marxist,” the “proletarian,” and the “socialist.” A History of the Soviet turns the pivotal term of modern Russian history into a historical problematic and undertakes a near-century-long (1900s-1980s) interdisciplinary study of cultural change at a time of social, economic, and generational transformation. It seeks to make possible a new cultural history of Russia in the twentieth century as well as a rethinking of the history of totalitarianism, transnational communism, and worldwide trafficking of the Soviet model.
Professor Krylova is a co-organizer with Tani Barlow (Rice University) of the 2012-2015 Duke-Rice International Faculty-Graduate Workshop Series “COMMUNIST LEGACIES AND POST-COMMUNIST REALITIES IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES." Since 2009, she has been directing the History Department Colloquium. She also serves on the advisory board of the Research Triangle Seminar Series "History of the Military, War, and Society" and of the Carolina Seminar "Russia and Its Empire, East and West" (Duke, UNC at Chapel Hill).
She has delivered public talks on Soviet and European experiences in World War II, Soviet Cold War culture, and peculiarities of Russia’s capitalism and failing democracy. In 2009-2010, she participated in a CBC six-hour documentary series on World War II, which was broadcasted in Canada and France in May of 2010.
Awards and Honors
2011
Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, awarded for the best first book in
European history.
2008-2009
Mellon Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop Fellowship, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke
University.
2006-2010
Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History, Duke University.
2005-2002
Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies,
Harvard University.
1998-1999
Social Science Research Council Dissertation Write-up Grant.
1999 Stulman Graduate Student,
Department of History, Johns Hopkins University.
1997-1998 IREX Individual Advanced
Research Opportunities Fellowship.
1997-1998 Pre-Dissertation Fellowship
Award, Association for Women in Slavic Studies.