Victoria Smolkin

Victoria Smolkin is Associate Professor of Russian History at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut). She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley in 2010. Her publications include: “The Confession of an Atheist Who Became a Scholar of Religion”: Nikolai Semenovich Gordienko’s Last Interview,” Kritika (Summer 2014), and “The Ticket to the Soviet Soul: Science, Religion and the Spiritual Crisis of Late Soviet Atheism,” in Russian Review (April 2014). Smolkin's research has been supported by Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies; the Social Science Research Council Eurasia Post-Doctoral Research Award; the Sherman Emerging Scholar Lectureship; the Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship in Religion and Ethics; and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, among others. Smolkin-Rothrock’s forthcoming monograph is titled A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: The Spiritual Life of Soviet Atheism. In 2014-2015, Smolkin was a Title VIII Research Fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C.