Welcome Stuart Finkel!

Stuart Finkel is the most recent addition to the Russian Department after many years teaching history at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He is not entirely new to Dartmouth, however, having previously taught as a visitor including courses on the Russian Revolution, Soviet history and culture, and the history of human rights. He is currently completing a book entitled For Martyrs or for Enemies: Aid to Political Prisoners in Russia and the Soviet Union, which both surveys the long, complex history of aid to political prisoners & exiles through the 19th and 20th centuries, and provides a detailed examination of the so-called "Political Red Cross," which led by Ekaterina Peshkova lobbied on their behalf from 1918 to 1937. In so doing, it also engages critically with the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on the origins and genesis of international human rights and humanitarianism.

Area of Expertise

The Russian & Soviet Intelligentsia / Political Prisoners and Human Rights / The Russian Revolution / 19th and 20th c. Russian & Soviet cultural politics / Intellectuals and the Public Sphere

He also continues more broadly to investigate the contentious but persistent notion of Russian intellectuals as "public actors," expanding on his previous scholarship on their sharply contested role following the Revolutions of 1917. His first book, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (Yale University Press, 2007) examined the series of disputes culminating in the expulsion of scores of prominent intellectuals from early Soviet Russia and the initial severe restrictions on autonomous civil society under the Bolsheviks.

Professor Finkel will be teaching  W19;  RUSS 38: Special topics in Russian Literature Russia and the West?  S19; RUSS 32: Reading Red: 20th Century Russian Fiction

My research focuses on the intersecting history of human rights, politics, and the intelligentsia. I am currently completing For Martyrs or for Enemies: Aid to Political Prisoners in Russia and the USSR, a book surveying the long history of such aid through the 19th and 20th centuries, examining in particular the so-called "Political Red Cross," which lobbied on behalf of political detainees from 1918 to 1937.