Professional Affiliation

Professor of History, Ball State University

Expert Bio

Sergei Zhuk is Professor of History at Ball State University, Indiana, USA. A former Soviet expert in US history, he moved in 1997 to the United States, defended his American Ph.D. dissertation about imperial Russian history at Johns Hopkins University in 2002. His research interests are Soviet/Russian/Ukrainian history, imperialism and fascism in Russian past and present; Russian intelligence; international relations (especially US-Russia relations), knowledge production, popular culture and cultural consumption.

Expertise

• Cold War
• History
• International Development
• Security and Defense
• Society and Culture
• U.S. Politics

Wilson Center Project

The KGB/Russian Intelligence, Academic Imperialism, Ukraine, and Western Academia, 1946 – 1991

Project Summary

Using the KGB documents, my research project is an attempt to explore how Soviet/Russian intelligence with their spies and other “agents of influence” not only promoted Russian academic imperialism in the West but became influential in the development of various centers for Soviet/Russian/Ukrainian Studies in the West since the early days of the Cold War in the 1940s to the Russian war against Ukraine in 2022. My project will be also a good and practical reference tool for Western policymakers and general audience, educating them about the Soviet roots of recent Russian meddling in Western politics and education.

Major Publications

• KGB Operations against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine, 1953 – 1991 (London and New York: Routledge [Taylor & Francis] Publishing Company, 2022) [paperback edition: January 2024]
• Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2018 [London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019] [paperback: September 2019])
• Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press & Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010 [paperback: March 2017])

Previous Terms

Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar, Kennan Institute 8/01/2002-5/01/2003 and 07/15/2019-08/16/2019.