Russian Studies Workshop

Teaching and Research Specialties: Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Russia-US Relations, Cold War History, Comparative History of Popular Culture

A former Soviet expert in U.S. history, especially in the social and cultural history of colonial British America, Sergei Zhuk, moved in 1997 to the United States, defending his new (now American) Ph.D. dissertation about imperial Russian history at Johns Hopkins University in 2002. Since 1997, he has taught American colonial history, Russian/Soviet and Ukrainian history at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University.

His research interests are international relations, knowledge production, cultural consumption, religion, popular culture and identity in the history of imperial Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Zhuk’s scholarship was awarded numerous research grants, including from the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bellagio Center in Italy, Fulbright, Mellon Foundation, ACLS, IREX, Petro Jacyk and Tymkiw Ukrainian Studies grants from the University of Toronto and Harriman Institute, Columbia University. His recent books include Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR: People’s Diplomacy in the Cold War (2017), Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (2010), and Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 (2004). He is currently writing a book about Soviet interference and meddling in U.S. domestic politics during the Cold War. His second book project is a comparative history of small towns in the U.S. and Soviet Ukraine during the Cold War.