Russian Program
Russian and East European Studies Faculty
YURY P. AVVAKUMOV
Assistant Professor of Theology
PhD equivalent 1990, Russian Orthodox Theological Seminary and Academy (St. Petersburg)
Dr. theol. 2001, Ludwig Maximilian University (Munich)
Professor Avvakumov specializes in Russian and Ukrainian religious history and in the theology and history of the Byzantine rite Churches (Catholic and Orthodox) from their medieval beginnings to the present day. He is currently working on a large editorial project devoted to the history of Byzantine-rite Catholics in Russia and Ukraine based on documents from the recently opened archives in Lviv, Ukraine: Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi and the Greco-Catholics in Russia, 1899-1944 (vol. 1 was published in Lviv in 2004, vol. 2 is in progress). He has authored a study on Juraj Krizanic and Russian Old Believers in the 17th century (Bogoslovskie trudy 1986), and was co-editor of the collection Religion und Gesellschaft im postsowjetischen Raum (Würzburg 1996) and of the almanac Dia-Logos: Religion and Society published in Moscow, Kyiv and Munich in 1996–2006. He has also contributed chapters to several volumes on the religious history of Eastern Europe, as well as numerous articles to such scholarly journals as Bogoslovskie trudy (Moscow), Bohoslovja (Lviv), Ostkirchliche Studien, and others.
Office: 429 Malloy Hall | Phone: 631-7153 | yavvakum@nd.edu
CHARLES BARBER
Professor of Art History
PhD 1989, Courtauld Institute of Art.
Barber's work has focused on the intellectual history of the icon. His writings have addressed topics that reach from the Early Christian era until the present day, and he has worked with materials from both the Greek and the Russian Orthodox tradition. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (2002) and Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (2007). He is presently at work on a study of poetics in Post-Byzantine painting.
Office: 118 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-7452 |cbarber@nd.edu
JOHN DEAK
Assistant Professor of History
PhD 2009, University of Chicago
John Deak is broadly interested in the history of modern European political culture,
bureaucratization, and the expanding purview of state authority from the Enlightenment to the present. His research focus is on the constitutional and political history of central Europe, particularly the Habsburg Monarchy and its successor states. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the interplay of democratic development and bureaucratic authority in the Habsburg Empire and the Austrian First Republic. His teaching interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German history, the Habsburg Monarchy, the relationship between Germans and their eastern neighbors, as well as state-building in Europe since the Enlightenment.
Office: 463 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-5767 | jdeak@nd.edu
LAUREN FAULKNER
Assistant Professor of History
PhD 2009, Brown University
Lauren Faulkner studies the history of modern Germany, focusing on social, cultural and military issues, as well as modern European cultural and intellectual history. She completed an M.A. at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and a Ph.D. in History at Brown University in May 2009. Her primary interests focus on the interplay of religious and national identity during the Third Reich, and the development and maintenance of a Catholic military chaplaincy in Germany between 1935 and 1945. She is also interested in exploring comparative cases of Catholic priests and seminarians fighting alongside soldiers, particularly in Poland and Croatia, as well as in France. She is currently revising her doctoral dissertation for publication.
Office: 279 O'Shaughnessy Hall | Phone: 631-9827 | lfaulkne@nd.edu
PATRICK D. GAFFNEY, C.S.C.
Associate Professor of Anthropology
PhD 1982, University of Chicago.
Professor Gaffney's research interests include social and cultural anthropology, the social organization of religion (especially Islam), systems of religious and political authority, ritual performance, popular movements, violence, peace making, and humanitarian emergencies. He has done extensive research in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa and is the author of the book The Prophet's Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (1994) and co-author of Breaking Cycles of Violence: Conflict Prevention and Interstate Crisis (1999). Lately, he has turned his attention to Eastern Europe, having taught at the University of Warsaw in 2003, followed by a year spent studying in Russia. He is now engaged in research on attitudes and practices surrounding the memory of the dead, changing funeral rites, and views of the after-life in the former Soviet lands.
Office: 644 Flanner Hall | Phone: 631-4113 | pgaffney@nd.edu
DAVID GASPERETTI
Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature
PhD 1985, University of California-Los Angeles
Professor Gasperetti is the author of The Rise of the Russian Novel: Carnival, Stylization, and Mockery of the West (1998) and is currently working on a monograph tracing the Russian conception of novel writing from its origins in the eighteenth century to the Golden Age of the novel in the mid-nineteenth century. His teaching interests include 19th- and early 20th-century Russian literature, parody, and the relationship between narrative and systems of belief.
Office: 341 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-7697 | dgaspere@nd.edu
ALYSSA GILLESPIE
Co-Director of the Program in Russian and East European Studies
Associate Professor of Russian Language and Literature
PhD 1998, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Professor Gillespie is the author of A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva (2001) and the editor of Russian Literature in the Age of Realism (2003) in the series Dictionary of Literary Biography. She has published articles on Tolstoy, Gorky, Pushkin, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Brodsky, Pawlikowska, and Sep-Szarzynski, as well as translations of the poetry of Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich, Fet, and others. Her current major project is a study of crime and conscience in the writings of Alexander Pushkin. Her research and teaching interests include Russian and Polish poetry, gender issues in literature, the poetry of exile, and the psychology of poetic genius.
Office: 345 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-3849 | Alyssa.W.Gillespie.20@nd.edu
DEBRA JAVELINE
Assistant Professor of Political Science
PhD 1997, Harvard University
Professor Javeline specializes in comparative politics, mass political behavior, survey research, and the politics of post-Soviet and other post-communist regimes. She recently published Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages (2003) in addition to several articles. She is currently conducting research on judicial effectiveness and respect for law in Russia. She has held fellowships from a number of agencies including Fulbright-Hays, Mellon, ACTR, FLAS, Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian Studies, the University of Colorado's Institute of Behavioral Science, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.
Office: 402 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-2793 | javeline@nd.edu
PAUL JOHNSON
Associate Professor of Music.
PhD 1981, Princeton University.
Professor Johnson, composer and music theorist, works in late 19th- and early 20th-century Russian art and culture with an emphasis on the St. Petersburg cliques that formed around Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Serge Diaghilev, the "Mighty Five" and the Ballets Russe. A specialist in the music of Stravinsky, he is co-editor of Stravinsky Retrospectives (1987), and has worked on allied early 20th century composers such as Holst, Schoenberg, and Debussy. His compositions have been performed across the United States, and two recordings by the Kiev Philharmonic, The Wild Swans at Coole and Spring in Wartime, have recently been released on ERM Records.
Office: 214 Crowley Hall | Phone: 631-5165 | pjohnson@nd.edu
MIKOLAJ KUNICKI
Assistant Professor of History
PhD 2004, Stanford University
Kunicki is a historian of twentieth-century Poland and Eastern Europe. His work focuses primarily on the role of nationalism in Polish and Eastern European history and analyzes the complex entanglement of fascism, Communism, and Catholicism. He is particularly interested in exploring nationalist-communist affinities as well as the ideological kinship between the radical right and the extreme left. By doing so, he reevaluates and challenges the way the history of communist Poland and Eastern Europe has been understood and presented. Profesor Kunicki is also interested in examining cinematic representations of the national past and the status of film vis-à-vis communist regimes in Eastern Europe. His current project is a comprehensive political biography of Polish nationalist politician Boleslaw Piasecki (1915-1979).
Office: 414 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-4560 | mkunicki@nd.edu
SEMION LYANDRES
Co-Director of the Program in Russian and East European Studies
Associate Professor of History
PhD 1992, Stanford University
Professor Lyandres is a political historian of the late Imperial and early Soviet periods. A native of St. Petersburg, he has advanced degrees from Boston University and his Ph.D. from Stanford. Lyandres’ current research focuses on the problem of legitimacy in and around 1917, especially as it relates to the origins and politics of the Russian Provisional (revolutionary) Government. He is the founder and North American editor of the international series "Modern and Contemporary Russian History: Monographs and Documents," and is also one of the two editors of the "Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography."
Office: 453 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-3853 | slyandre@nd.edu
ALEXANDER MARTIN
Associate Professor of History
PhD 1993, University of Pennsylvania
Martin's specialty is Russian history in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with a focus on the history of intellectual debates about political, social, and cultural issues. He is the author of Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (1997), as well as the editor and translator of Provincial Russia in the Age of Enlightenment: The Memoir of a Priest's Son (2002) by Dmitrii Rostislavov. His current research focuses on Russia's experience in the Napoleonic Wars, the modernization of Moscow from the 1770s to the 1870s, and German-Russian intellectual and religious ties. Martin is also one of the editors of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.
Office: 412 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-9907 | amarti20@nd.edu
THOMAS MARULLO
Professor of Russian Language and Literature
PhD 1975, Cornell University
Beyond numerous articles, papers, and reviews, Professor Marullo is the author of Ivan Bunin: Russian requiem (1885-1920) (1993); Ivan Bunin: From the Other Shore (1920-1933) (1995); If You see the Buddha: Studies in the Fiction of Ivan Bunin (1998); Ivan Bunin: The Cursed Days (1998); Ivan Bunin: The Liberation of Tolstoy (2003); Ivan Bunin: About Chekhov. The Unfinished Symphony (2007); Petersburg: The Physiology of a City (2009). At present, he has completed Heroine Abuse: Dostoevsky’s “Netochka Nezvanova” and the Poetics of Codepdency, and is writing Master or Man: Dostoevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov and the Prosaics of Orthodox Christianity and Fyodor Dostoevsky: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1821-1845). A Life in Letters, Memoirs, and Criticism. He is also on the editorial board of the Slavic and East European Journal.
Office: 306 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-5061 | tmarullo@nd.edu
A. JAMES McADAMS
Director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies
Dr. William M. Scholl Chair in International Politics
Professor of Political Science
PhD 1983, University of California, Berkeley
Professor McAdams teaches courses on the comparative politics and foreign policy of Eastern and Western Europe. He is the author of Germany Divided (1993, 1994), East Germany and Detente (1985), and Judging the Past in Unified Germany (2001), coauthor of Rebirth: A History of Europe (1992), and editor of Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (1997). He is currently working on the politics of the Internet. He has published articles in The Review of Politics, Foreign Affairs, World Politics, Comparative Politics, and other journals. He has held fellowships from the ACLS, Fulbright-Hays, DAAD, the Hoover Institution, the Humboldt Foundation, IREX, the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, and the MacArthur Foundation. He has received the Charles Sheedy Award for Excellence in Teaching (1995), the John Kaneb Teaching Award (2001), and the John Madden Teaching Award for First-Year Students (2001). In 1997, he was awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German Studies.
Office: 211 Brownson Hall | Phone: 631-5253 | amcadams@nd.edu
MONIKA NALEPA
Assistant Professor of Political Science
PhD 2005, Columbia University
Professor Nalepa specializes in comparative politics, game theoretic approaches to problems of transitional justice and democratization and the study of post-communist regimes. Her new manuscript Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe: Skeletons in the Closet has recently been accepted by Cambridge University Press. She has also published articles and chapters in edited volumes on democratization and institutions of transitional justice. In 2006, she co-edited a special volume of the Journal of Conflict Resolution devoted to transitional justice. Currently, Professor Nalepa is working on building a dataset that will allow her to test a set of hypothesis derived from her theory on the effectiveness of transitional justice institutions and popular demand for dealing with the past.
Office: 439 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-6828 | mnalepa@nd.edu
MOLLY PEENEY
Assistant Professional Specialist of Russian Language and Literature
PhD 2010, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Professor Peeney’s dissertation, Contextualizing the Lonely Genius: Vladimir Nabokov and Soviet Literature of the 1920s and 30s, demonstrates how Nabokov was engaging with and responding to concurrent Soviet literature while he was writing his Russian novels in emigration in Berlin. More broadly, she is interested in Russian and European Modernism, focusing on issues of narrative and intertextuality. She teaches all levels of Russian language as well as 19th and 20th-century Russian poetry and prose.
Office: 309 Decio Hall | Phone: 631-4710 | mpeeney@nd.edu
