Dr. Miriam Dobson, M.A. (Cantab.), M.A., Ph.D. (Lond.)
Senior Lecturer in Modern History [20th c. Russia]
Email: m.dobson@sheffield.ac.uk
Room: Jessop West: 2.09 | Telephone: (0114) 22 22567
Office Hours, Spring 2011-12: Tuesdays 12:00-13:00, Thursdays 14:00-15:30
| Biography |
Miriam Dobson studied Russian and French at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before moving to the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, University College London, where she gained an MA in History and later her PhD. She held a Scouloudi History Research Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research (2002-03) and a one-year lectureship at the University of Liverpool (2003-4), before starting at Sheffield in September 2004. Her first monograph, Khrushchev´s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin won the won the 2010 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize awarded by Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies `for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year´.
Miriam Dobson is a member of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies and convenes (with Zoe Knox, University of Leicester) a Study Group on Religion and Spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe (RSREE). In 2007 she was co-organiser of a major international conference 'The relaunch of the Soviet project, 1945-1964', held at SSEES, UCL.
| Membership of Professional Bodies |
- Member of British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES)
- Co-convenor of BASEES Study Group on Religion and Spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe (RSREE)
| Research |
Current Research
Miriam´s current project is entitled `The Unorthodox: Baptists and Evangelical Christians in Soviet Russia, 1944-1991´ and is funded by a small research grant from the British Academy. In this project she will study state-church relations in the late Soviet period, exploring on the one hand how the government used bureaucratic, legalistic and propagandistic means to curb religious activity and on the other how religious groups sought to evade or at least attenuate this control. The project will explore the experience of belonging to a congregation and the meaning of belief in a radically atheist state.
Research Interests
Miriam's research interests lie in the history of the Soviet Union, with a particular emphasis on the social and cultural history of post-war Russia. Her first book explored popular responses to the reforms of the Khrushchev era, in particular the massive exodus of prisoners from the Gulag. Khrushchev's Cold Summer examined the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin's terror. Her current project focuses on a very specific group – evangelical Protestants – but continues to develop her earlier interest in how individuals and communities related to the Soviet project.
Research Supervision
Miriam Dobson teaches twentieth-century Russian history. Her current course offerings include a final-year documents based course on 'Stalinism and De-Stalinisation'. She welcomes inquiries from students wishing to pursue post-graduate study on aspects of modern Russian history.
| Administrative Roles and Responsibilities |
- Senior Tutor (2010-)
- Director of MA Programmes (2008-9)
- Member of Teaching Committee (2005-present), Postgraduate Committee (2008-9), Research Committee (2008-9) and Admissions Committee (2004-7)
- History Department Teaching and Learning Advocate (2005-2008)
- Convenor of Level 2 module Historians and History (2006-2008)
| Selected Publications |
Books:
- Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Cornell University Press, 2009)
- Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Modern History, co-edited with Benjamin Ziemann (Routledge, 2008)
Articles and Book Chapters:
- 'The Post-Stalin Era: De-Stalinisation, Daily Life, and Dissent', Kritiika, forthcoming 2011.
- 'Cold Summer of 53', Directory of World Cinema: Russia, ed. Birgit Beumers (Intellect, 2010), 72-73.
- 'Letters', in Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Modern History, co-edited with Benjamin Ziemann (Routledge, 2008), 57-73.
- 'POWs and Purge Victims: Attitudes towards Party Rehabilitation in Vladimir and Moscow, 1956-7', Slavonic and East European Review (Spring 2008), 328-345.
- '"Show the Bandits No Mercy!": Amnesty, Criminality and Public Response in 1953', The Dilemmas of De-Stalinisation: A Social and Cultural History of Reform in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly A. Jones (RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 21-40.
- 'Contesting the Paradigms of De-Stalinization: Readers' Responses to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich', Slavic Review, 64 (2005), 580-600.
- 'Anti-religious Campaigns in the Russian Press, 1953-1964', Slovo, 13 (2001), 139-152.
Book reviews for the following journals:
- Cold War History, Reviews in History, Slavonic and Eastern European Review, Europe-Asia Studies, Slavonic and Eastern European Review, H-soz-u-Kult, Slovo.