Professional Affiliation

Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Department of History; Interim Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, Georgetown University; Former Wilson Center Fellow

Expert Bio

Michael David-Fox is a historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union and professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. After completing his A.B. at Princeton and his Ph.D. at Yale, David-Fox was a Research Scholar at the Kennan Institute and taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is Founding and Executive Editor of the scholarly journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, for which he was awarded the 2010 Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. David-Fox has been a Humboldt Fellow in Berlin, a visiting professor at EHESS in Paris, a Davis Fellow at Princeton, a Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum. He holds an honorary professorship from Samara State University in Russia.

Wilson Center Project

"Smolensk under Nazi and Soviet Rule"

Project Summary

Crafted as a new type of “entangled” history, my project pursues insights at the intersection of three major fields: the study of the Nazi occupation of Soviet territories during World War II, the study of Stalinism, and the study of the Holocaust in the East. Through a twin investigation of local cadres and the reach of ideology, this project investigates political violence not in isolation, but as one dominant component in the overall exercise of power. My project positions me to comment on the politics of history in Russia today and the “memory wars” between Russia and its neighbors.

Major Publications

Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012

Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Soviet Russia. Under contract with University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies.In press

Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929. Ithaca: Cornell University Press and Studies of the Harriman Institute, 1997

Previous Terms

Research Grant, Kennan Institute. Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland. "Toward a Re-evaluation of NEP in Cultural and Intellectual Affairs." June 1, 1994 - Jan 31, 1995. Project Description: The project analyzes those far-reaching and frequently contradictory developments that were built in to the NEP turning-point, broadly conceived, and demonstrates how they then shaped the NEP order in cultural and intellectual affairs. Research Grant, Kennan Institute. "The Higher Part Schools: Education, Politics and Ideology during the New Economic Policy, 1921 - 1929." November 1991. This project was an analysis of the developments that were built in to the NEP turning-point, broadly conceived, and to demonstrate how they then shaped the NEP order in cultural and intellectual affairs, which itself evolved in the course of the 1920s. Analysis of higher education during NEP. Keywords: communist party education; intelligentsia; Sverdlov; educational conflict; political activity; student life