Barbara B. Walker
Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor
Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1994
Mack Social Sciences, MSS 107
Phone: (775) 784-4303
Email: bbwalker@unr.edu
Professor Walker teaches a variety of courses in the area of modern Russian and European and Inner Eurasian History. In the Core Humanities program she teaches The Modern World (CH 202). In the History Department at the 200-level she teaches a regional survey of Inner Eurasian history, Nomads to Nations in Inner Eurasia; at the 300-level, the national surveys Russia to 1900 and 20th century Russia and the Soviet Union; and in her 400-level series of seminars on Topics in Russian and Eastern European History, she has taught Women, Family and Community in Russian History, Politics and Society in Modern Eastern Europe, The World of Joseph Stalin, Soviet Dissent, and Literature and Society in Modern Russia. She also teaches History 300, Historical Research and Writing, for History majors. As a USAC guest professor in Lueneburg, Germany during the spring of 2004, she taught East Germany and ‘The Beautiful West,’ and Hitler’s Germany. At the graduate level she teaches modern Russian and Soviet history as well as modern European history including a field in family and community in modern Europe. She is also available for special readings courses and senior theses in her areas of expertise with both undergraduate and graduate students.
As a research scholar, Professor Walker specializes in late 19th and 20th century Russian history with a special focus on the social and cultural history of Russian intellectuals during this period. She is presently working on the Cold War encounter between Soviet dissidents and US journalists. Recent honors and fellowships she has received for her research include a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Fellowship, an International Research Exchange IARO Research Fellowship, a Hoover Institution Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Title VIII), and the 2005 Feltner-Mousel Award for Research, University of Nevada, Reno.
Select publications:
Monograph:
Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005.
Reviews:
Rachel Polonsky, highlighted review “Otnarpros man,” in the Times Literary Supplement, September 9, 2005, p. 9.
Sarah Pratt in modernism/modernity, 13. 1 (2006) 929-931.
Jeffrey Brooks in American Historical Review 111, 2 (2006) 589-590
Articles:
“Joseph Stalin, “Our Teacher Dear:” Mentorship, Social Transformation, and the Russian Intelligentsia Personality Cult Across the Revolution of 1917,” in Personenkulte im Stalinismus / Personality Cults in Stalinism, ed. Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004.
"Kruzhok Culture and the Meaning of Patronage in the Early Soviet Literary World,” Contemporary European History II , I, Special Issue: Patronage, Personal Networks and the Party-State (2002): 107-123.
“(Still) Searching for a Soviet Society: A Review of Recent Scholarship on Personal Ties in Soviet Political and Economic Life,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43:3 (July 2001): 631-42.
"On Reading Soviet Memoirs: A History of the “Contemporaries” Genre as an Institution of Russian Intelligentsia Culture from the 1790’s to the 1970’s," The Russian Review 59 (July 2000): 327-52.
"Kruzhkovaia kul’tura i stanovlenie sovetskoi intelligentsii: na primere Maksimiliana Voloshina i Maksima Gor’kogo," Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 40 (December, 1999): 210-222.
"Conversations with an East German Poet," Cross Currents 6 (1987): 219-248.
Courses:
- HIST 296: Nomads to Nations in Inner Eurasia
- HIST 300: Historical Research and Writing
- HIST 395: Russian History to 1900
- HIST 396: 20th Century Russia and the Soviet Union
- HIST 469/669: Topics in Russian and East European History
- HIST 712: Seminar in Modern European History
- CH 202: The Modern World