Margaret Samu is an art historian who specializes in the art and design of 18th- and 19th-century Russia. She teaches at The New School's Parsons School of Design and lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She previously worked in the Russian and Slavic Studies Department at New York University, Stern College for Women, and in the City University of New York system. [1]
Samu is an active member of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture , which she served as president from 2013 until 2015. [2] She is a member of the Organizing Committee of the 19v Working Group on Nineteenth-Century Russian Culture, Literature, and the Arts, and co-organizes the 19v Art History Seminar. [3]
Samu is a specialist in Russian art. [4] [5] [6] [7] In 2016, she was awarded the Mary Zirin Prize by the Association for Women In Slavic Studies. [8]
Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhattan art academies in protest of limited creative autonomy, Parsons is one of the oldest schools of art and design in New York.
The New School is a private research university in New York City. It was founded in 1919 as The New School for Social Research with an original mission dedicated to academic freedom and intellectual inquiry and a home for progressive thinkers. Since then, the school has grown to house five divisions within the university. These include the Parsons School of Design, the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, the College of Performing Arts, which includes the Mannes School of Music, The New School for Social Research, and the Schools of Public Engagement.
German studies is the field of humanities that researches, documents and disseminates German language and literature in both its historic and present forms. Academic departments of German studies often include classes on German culture, German history, and German politics in addition to the language and literature component. Common German names for the field are Germanistik, Deutsche Philologie, and Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft und Literaturwissenschaft. In English, the terms Germanistics or Germanics are sometimes used, but the subject is more often referred to as German studies, German language and literature, or German philology.
Rachel Sherman is an associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research. Her first book, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, analyzes how workers, guests, and managers in luxury hotels make sense of and negotiate class inequalities that marked their relationships. Her second book, Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, explores the lived experience of privilege among wealthy and affluent parents in New York City.
Russell Zguta is a US historian, educator, and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri.
The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) is a scholarly society "dedicated to advancing knowledge about Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, and Eastern Europe in regional and global contexts." The ASEEES supports teaching, research, and publication relating to the peoples and territories within this area.
Ronald Grigor Suny is an American-Armenian historian and political scientist. Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Michigan and served as director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, 2009 to 2012 and was the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2015, William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History (2015–2022), and is Emeritus Professor of political science and history at the University of Chicago.
Wayne S. Vucinich was an American historian. Following World War II, he was one of the founders of Russian, Slavic, East European and Byzantine studies at Stanford University, where he spent his entire academic career.
Kate Brown is a Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019), Dispatches from Dystopia (2015), Plutopia (2013), and A Biography of No Place (2004). She was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) from 2000 to 2018. She is the founding consulting editor of History Unclassified in the American Historical Review.
Catriona Helen Moncrieff Kelly, FBA is a British academic specialising in Russian culture. From 1996 to 2021, she was Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College. In 2021, she was elected senior research fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and honorary professor of the University of Cambridge.
Lucille Tenazas is a graphic designer, educator, and the founder of Tenazas Design. Her work consists of layered imagery and typography, focusing on the importance of language. She was born in Manila, Philippines, yet has spent a large portion of her life practicing in the United States.
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is an art historian, curator, and professor of American art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has curated major exhibitions and published several books on African American art. In 2019, she became director of history, research and scholarship and senior historian at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.
Rosalind Polly Blakesley is a prize-winning author, art historian and academic. She has taught art history at the University of Cambridge and been a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge since 2002, and has been Professor of Russian and European Art since 2018. She previously worked at Queen's College, Oxford, the Russian Institute of Art History, Newcastle University, and the University of Kent. She has been selected to take up the office of Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, following the retirement of Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury on 1st October 2025.
Alexei Vladimirovich Yurchak is a Russian-born American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research concerns the history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet transformations in Russia and the post-Soviet states.
Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier is a Polish-American art historian and a specialist in nineteenth century Russian art. Her work on the Peredvizhniki, first published in 1977, was part of a re-evaluation of their aims in breaking away from the Russian academy.
Charmaine Andrea Nelson is a Canadian art historian, educator, author, and independent curator. Nelson was a full professor of art history at McGill University until June 2020 when she joined NSCAD University to develop the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery. She is the first tenured Black professor of art history in Canada. Nelson's research interests include the visual culture of slavery, race and representation, Black Canadian studies and African Canadian history as well as critical theory, post-colonial studies, Black feminist scholarship, Transatlantic Slavery Studies, and Black Diaspora Studies. In addition to teaching and publishing in these research areas, Nelson has curated exhibitions, including at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.
Beth Holmgren is an American literary critic and a cultural historian in Polish and Russian studies. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University. Recognised for her scholarship in Russian women's studies and Polish cultural history, she is as of July 2018 working on a multicultural history of fin-de-siecle Warsaw. Before coming to Duke, she taught at the University of California-San Diego (1987-1993) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1993-2007). She earned her B.A at Grinnell College, and two master's degrees and and her doctoral doctorate at Harvard University.
Margaret Irene Malamud is Professor of Ancient History and Islamic Studies at New Mexico State University. Malamud is known in particular for her work on classical reception in the United States.
Francine Hirsch is an American historian, specializing in modern Europe with a focus on Russia and the Soviet Union. She is a recipient of the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize for her book, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union, as well as honors from the American Society of International Law, the Council of European Studies, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for her work.
Mary Zirin was an American scholar of Russian literature and an advocate for Slavic women's studies, who is remembered for her translations of Russian manuscripts and compilations of bibliographies of Slavic women. Her works, Dictionary of Russian Women Writers (1994) and Women and Gender in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia: A Comprehensive Bibliography (2007) have become standard references in the field. In the 1980s, she founded the Women East-West newsletter, which became the press organ of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies in 1989. Zirin established a scholarship fund for the Slavic Reference Service of the University of Illinois and with her husband endowed a chair in pulmonary biology in Colorado at National Jewish Health. The Mary Zirin Prize, created in her honor in 1999, is an annual award given by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies to promote independent scholarship.