Michael David-Fox

Michael David-Fox is a historian of Russia and the USSR. His work has ranged across political and cultural history, communism and fascism, the history of the Russian Revolution and comparative revolutionary studies, transnational studies and modernity theory, and the history of Bolshevism and Stalinism. His most recent research explores the history of the Eastern Front in WWII, Nazi-Stalinist entanglements, political violence, the German occupation of Russian territories in WWII, and the historical roots and history politics of Putinism.

At the outset of his career, David-Fox became one of the first foreign researchers to work in formerly closed Communist Party archives during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He went on to become a founding editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History [https://kritika.georgetown.edu/], now based at Georgetown, a transformative journal that has helped to internationalize the field of Russian/Soviet and Eurasian Studies. For this, he received the 2010 Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. From 2013 until 24 February 2022, David-Fox was Scholarly Supervisor at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, later the Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Until its closure after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, David-Fox helped make it into one of the world's leading research centers in the field, an international crossroads for all those traveling to Moscow to conduct archival and historical research. During his tenure, David-Fox helped select and mentor 19 postdoctoral fellows who came from scholarly centers in countries around the world.

David-Fox received his A.B. from Princeton and his PhD from Yale. He is author of Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929 (1997); Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (2012, translated into Russian and Chinese, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title); Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (2015, Russian translation NLO 2020, winner of the 2016 Historia Nova Prize for Best Book in Russian Intellectual and Cultural History); and Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Harvard University Press, forthcoming Feb. 2025, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674247468).

In those four single-authored books, eleven edited or co-edited volumes, twelve edited special theme issues of journals, and over 50 articles and chapters, David-Fox has probed unexpected connections between culture and politics, institutions and mentalities, and domestic and international shifts. He maintains strong interests in international, transnational, and comparative history.

David-Fox has been a Humboldt Fellow (Germany), a visiting professor at the Centre russe, EHESS (France), and was awarded the title of honorary professor from Samara State University (Russia). He has been a visiting scholar or fellow at the W. Averill Harriman Institute at Columbia University, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the Mershon Center for Studies in International Security and Public Policy, the National Academy of Education, the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2017). In 2023, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam.