Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor of History, Binghamton University

Expert Bio

Heather DeHaan is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Russian and East European Program at Binghamton University. She is the author of Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power, published with the University of Toronto Press in 2013. Her current book project, In the Neighborhood of Empire: Baku Communities in the Late Soviet Period, examines the interplay of gender, ethnic, and social relations in Azerbaijan from the 1950s to the 1980s. She has also published articles on Soviet cities, post-socialist memory, and Azerbaijani identity as mediated through the practice of cultural exchange.

Wilson Center Project

Remembering Azerbaijan after Stalin (1953-1991)

Project Summary

This project brings together two scholars working on distinct but related aspects of history and memory in Azerbaijan. Dr. Shalala Mammadova's research concerns state-society relationships in the 1950s to 1970s and, in particular, how the memory of Azerbaijan's leaders and socio-political history has evolved both in official historiography and in popular perception. Dr. Heather DeHaan's research explores the reality and memory of inter-neighborhood relations in Baku in those same years. By historicizing two different but related sets of memory documents, we aim to produce a less polarized vocabulary for understanding late Soviet political, socioeconomic, and ethnic affairs.

Major Publications

• Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power in 1930s Nizhnii Novgorod, University of Toronto Press, 2013.
• “Remembering Our Worth: Commemorating the Azerbaijani Nation Through Exchange,” conditional acceptance for publication in Canadian Slavonic Papers, 63, nos. 1-2 (2021): 168-186. DOI:10.1080/00085006.2021.1915523
• “Baku’s Soviet Vnye: The Post-Soviet Creation of a Soviet Past.” In The Future of Post-Socialism. Edited by Dijana Jelaca and Daniela Lugaric. State University of New York Press, 2019. 145-162

Previous Terms

January - May 2009: Former Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar; "Whose Business Was the Socialist City?: The Austin Company and the Design of Avtozavod (Nizhnii Novgorod)