Professional Affiliation

Chief, European Division, Library of Congress

Expert Bio

John Van Oudenaren is the former chief of the European Division at the Library of Congress and founding director of the World Digital Library, a collaboration of the Library of Congress, UNESCO, and libraries, archives, and museums from around the world. He has been a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation and director of RAND's European office in Delft, the Netherlands; a member of the Policy Planning Staff of U.S. Department of State; a research associate at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies; and a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He received his Ph. D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his A. B. in Germanic Languages and Literature from Princeton University. Dr. Van Oudenaren is the author of several books and numerous articles on U.S.-Russia relations, European politics, and the European Union.

Wilson Center Project

Library of Congress Engagement with Russia during the Billington Years

Project Summary

From the last years of the Soviet Union until 2015, the Library of Congress under Librarian of Congress James H. Billington conducted a policy of engagement with Russian society and cultural institutions. This policy included exhibitions, exchanges of personnel, assistance to libraries, television programs, conferences and symposia, cooperative microfilming and digitization projects, and the Open World Leadership program. This project will document the scale and scope of LC’s Russia initiatives during Billington’s tenure; offer a case study of how LC as a Federal agency transformed itself from an institution organized for competition with the Soviet Union into one focused on assisting Russia and the Russian people; and examine how LC’s experience tracked with the general trend of Russian cultural policy over this period. The study will shed light on one aspect of U.S. policy in the post-cold war world and offer lessons for the future of U.S. cultural policy.

Major Publications

Crisis and Renewal: An Introduction to the European Union. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020 (forthcoming).

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  Uniting Europe: An Introduction to the European Union. Second edition. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
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  Détente in Europe: The Soviet Union and the West since 1953. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Previous Terms

October 1, 1987 - June 1, 1988