16 September 2013
Just a short train journey from Cheltenham, Europe’s biggest library opened in Birmingham at the beginning of September 2013. I went to visit the library with former UG Head of Library Services, Ann Mathie, on its opening weekend….
2 September 2013
Melanie Ilic has had two major pieces of research published over the summer. Life Stories of Soviet Women: the Interwar Generation (Routledge, 2013) is the culmination of several years’ work examining the everyday lives of eight women living…
12 July 2013
8 July 2013 saw the death of a Soviet heroine, Nadezhda Vasil’evna Popova, at the age of 91. Nadezhda Popova was just one of hundreds of Soviet airwomen who flew combat planes during the Second World War and…
17 June 2013
On Saturday 8 June I attended the annual conference of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES). CREES was established as a specialist interdisciplinary centre for research on the Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries at…
22 April 2013
From 5 to 8 April I was at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, for the annual British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies conference, which this year also hosted the International Council for Central and East European Studies European…
17 April 2013
Just an announcement to those who may not already know, on Wednesday April 24 Melanie Ilic’s inaugural lecture will take place on Park campus. Melanie has published widely on Soviet women’s history and became Professor of Soviet History…
15 April 2013
Hearty congratulations to Rob Hornsby for the publication of his book Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Rob was an AHRC-funded PhD student attached to a three-year project on ‘Policy and Governance…
8 March 2013
8 March 2013 marks the centenary of International Women’s Day celebrations in Russia. International Women’s Day has its origins at the women’s conference of the Second International in Copenhagen in 1910 with the aim of furthering the cause…
28 November 2012
On Friday 23 November, my friend and colleague Mark Harrison (Prof of Economics, University of Warwick) was interviewed for Radio 4’s Today programme (begins 2.24 to 2.29) about the Soviet practice of erasing the public record of political…
26 November 2012
‘Why do Caucasian Studies Matter?’ On 21 November, I attended a seminar organised by the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, The University of Birmingham, to celebrate the publication of a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies (vol….