Faculty and Staff
Alexey Golubev
Associate Professor
Alexey Golubev is a scholar of Russian history with a focus on social and cultural history of the twentieth century and an additional expertise in STS, transnational history, and digital history. He completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of British Columbia in 2016 and spent a year as a Banting Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Toronto before joining the UH Department of History in fall 2017. During the academic year 2020-21, he served as the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, where he worked on a project on science communication in socialist and post-socialist societies. Dr. Golubev has previously taught at Petrozavodsk University in Russia and was a visiting lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Freiburg in Germany. His research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Killam Trusts, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, German Historical Institute in Moscow, and the Russian Foundation for Humanities.
Research Interests
Russian and Soviet history, Europe in the twentieth century, materiality, history of knowledge, STS, transnational history, oral history, digital humanities.
Selected Publications
“No Natural Colonization: The Early Soviet School of Historical Anticolonialism,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 65.2 (2023): 190–204.
“The Working Body and Its Prostheses: Imagining Class for Soviet Children,” in Serguei Oushakine and Marina Balina, eds., The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 467–487.
"Digitizing Archives in Russia: Epistemic Sovereignty and Its Challenges in the Digital Age," in Daria Gritsenko, Mariëlle Wijermars, and Mikhail Kopotev, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies (London: Palgrave, 2021), 353–369 (open access).
The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020.
“Civil Wars, Visions of Statehood, and Quasi-State Actors in the Northwest of the Former Russian Empire,” Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2019): 186–196. With Alexander Osipov.
“‘A Wonderful Song of Wood’: Heritage Architecture of North Russia and the Soviet Quest for Historical Authenticity,” Rethinking Marxism 29.1 (2017): 142–172.
XX век: Письма войны [The Twentieth Century: War Letters]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016. Co-edited with Serguei Oushakine. In Russian.
Encyclopedia of the Barents Region. In 2 vols. Oslo: PAX, 2016. Co-edited with Mats-Olov Olsson (chief editor), Fredrick Backman, Lars Olsson and Björn Norlin.
The Barents Region: A Transnational History of Subarctic Northern Europe. Oslo: PAX, 2015. Co-edited with Lars Elenius (chief editor), Maria Lähteenmäki and Hallvard Tjelmeland.
“Time in 1:72 Scale: Plastic Historicity of Soviet Models,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17.1 (2016): 69–94.
The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United States and Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press; Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Press, 2014. With Irina Takala.
Selected Presentations
“The Popularization of Doubt: Scientific Literacy and Alternative Forms of Knowledge in the Soviet Union after World War II,” Fellows’ Presentation Series, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, February 17, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIHBXxTnHs4
"НЛО над планетарием: пропаганда науки и альтернативные формы знания в СССР," лекция в рамках проекта Зеркальной лаборатории Центра «Человек, природа, технологии» ТюмГУ и ИГИТИ НИУ ВШЭ, 30 ноября 2020 г.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZxphYoZHlg
Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies Interview Series Reimagining Russia, November 23, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REZYRRbY2Is
Media Outreach
Alvin Powell, “A Fact is No Match for a Martian,” Radcliffe Magazine, Spring 2021, https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/a-fact-is-no-match-for-a-martian.
Interview about The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia for the New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/alexey-golubev-the-things-of-life-materiality-in-late-soviet-russia-cornell-up-2020/.
“5 Questions about The Search for a Socialist El Dorado,” an Oral History Review blog series: https://oralhistoryreview.org/ohr-authors/5-questions-about-search-for-a-socialist-el-dorado/.