Research Interests for Anna Krylova

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.

Representative Publications

1. A. Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press) (2010)
2. A. Krylova, “Neither Erased nor Remembered: Soviet “Women Combatants” and Cultural Strategies of Forgetting In Soviet Russia, 1940s-1980s", in Histories of the Aftermath: The European Postwar in Comparative Perspective, edited by Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller (2010), Berghahn Books
3. A. Krylova, Identity, Agency, and the First Soviet Generation, in Stephen Lovell (ed.), Generations in 20th Century Europe (2007), Palgrave Macmillan
4. Beyond the Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm: 'Class Instinct' as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis, Slavic Review (Spring, 2003) [pdf]
5. 'Healers of Wounded Souls': The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet Literature and Society, 1944-46, Journal of Modern History (June, 2001) [pdf]
6. The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 1 no. 1 (Winter, 2000) [pdf]