Professional Affiliation

Director of the Oral History Center, Memorial

Expert Bio

Irina Scherbakova is a historian, philologist, and Director of the Oral History Center at Memorial.

She studied German philology at Moscow State University and holds a PhD in Philology (1978). In 1991-2006, Dr. Scherbakova was a senior methodologist at the Center for Oral History and Visual Anthropology at the Russian State University for the Humanities. Starting from 1999, she has been the coordinator of the annual Russian history competition for high school students run by Memorial Society and Director of the Oral History Center at Memorial.

In 2008, Dr. Scherbakova was a guest professor at the University of Bremen and the University of Jena (Germany). She has published articles in the Russian and international media (primarily in German-speaking countries) on the history of the GULAG, women in the GULAG, totalitarianism and the problems of memory, the Ostarbeiter, etc.

Dr. Scherbakova is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, boards of Marion Dönhoff Foundation and Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, and International Academic Advisory Board of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.

She holds a number of prestigious awards: the German Federal Cross of Merit (2005), the Carl von Ossietzky Prize for Contemporary History and Politics (2014), the Goethe Medal (2017), and the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2019).