Professional Affiliation

Professor of History, West Chester University

Expert Bio

Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is professor of history at West Chester University. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes and teaches about modern Russia and the Soviet Union, war and memory, international communism, and gender in modern Europe. Her research has focused on the linkages between the personal and political, investigating questions of how individuals - children who grew up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, survivors of the siege of Leningrad, volunteers in the International Brigades - came to represent their life stories as part of history. In 2016, she was awarded the Association for Women in Slavic Studies’ Outstanding Achievement Award.

Wilson Center Project

"Soviet Visitors and Russian American Immigrants: Cultural Exchanges in the 1930s"

Project Summary

The project offers a new approach to the study of international communism and Soviet American relations by tracing the interactions between Soviet visitors to the United States and Russian Americans, communists, and fellow travelers (groups with considerable overlap). The study focuses in particular on the 1935-36 American road trip taken by the popular satirists Ilia Ilf and Evgenii Petrov. Drawing on State Department records and personal archives, this research explores the identities of Russian American immigrants, who made new, often prosperous, homes for themselves in the United States while also supporting, even identifying with, the Soviet project. Uncovering Americans’ interactions with the Soviet writers contributes to the project’s overall goal of offering a new social and cultural approach to the history of international communism and Soviet American relations. The overarching question addressed by this project remains a concern to the policymaking community: How do transnational identities shape political activism?

Major Publications

International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge, 2015)

 

The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge, 2006)

 

Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (Routledge, 2001)

Previous Terms

May 10, 1998 - May 23, 1998: Title VIII-Supported Short-Term Grant, Kennan Institute, “Public and Personal identities in the Great Patriotic War” May 01, 2003 - Jun 01, 2003: Title VIII-Supported Short-Term Grant, Kennan Institute, "St. Petersburg and the Siege of Leningrad" Jul 06, 2010 - Jul 23, 2010. Kennan Institute Title VIII-Supported Short-Term Grant. Associate Professor, Department of History, West Chester University, West Chester, PA. "The Comintern and the Making of International Revolutionaries." Aug 6, 2012 to Aug 10, 2012. Kennan Institute Title VIII-Supported Short-Term Research Scholar. "American Communists in the Soviet Union."