Karen Petrone
Ph.D., Michigan, 1994
Karen Petrone is Professor of History and inaugural Director of the Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Kentucky. She served as Chair of the Department of History from 2011-2015 and 2016-2020 and was named College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in 2017-2018. Her primary research interests are cultural history, gender history, propaganda, war and memory, and the history of subjectivity and everyday life, especially in Russia and the Soviet Union.
Her book The Great War in Russian Memory (Indiana University Press, 2011) challenges the notion that World War I was a forgotten war in the Soviet Union. She argues that although the war was not officially commemorated by the Soviet state, it was the subject of lively discourse about religion, heroism, violence and patriotism during the interwar period. The book then traces how this discourse disappeared due to the growing militarization of the Soviet state in the 1930s. This work broadens Petrone's expertise on the culture of the Soviet interwar period, a subject she first explored in her book on Stalinist celebrations in the 1930s, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Indiana University Press, 2000).
Both in the project on World War I memory and in a series of other on-going projects, Petrone explores issues of gender. She has co-edited a volume of essays in comparative history with Jie-Hyun Lim of Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea, entitled Gender Politics in Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (Palgrave, 2011). She has engaged with several collaborations with Choi Chatterjee on the development of gender history in post-Soviet Russia, as well as on Soviet subjectivities.
Karen Petrone has co-written a textbook with Kenneth Slepyan for Oxford University Press, using primary documents to narrate Soviet history from 1939-2000. She has co-edited a book on Everyday Life in Russia: Past and Present with Choi Chatterjee, Mollie Cavender, and David Ransel.
Petrone is working on a manuscript entitled Reading War Memory in Putin’s Russia, under contract with Indiana University Press. Reading War Memory in Putin’s Russia provides a detailed analysis of how depictions of war memory in the Russian Federation build contemporary Russian national identity and weave this identity into a mythologized and militarized Russian past. It is a close reading of Russian war memory since the year 2000, a primer on how to study war memory in any time or place, and a manifesto on why studying war memory is crucial to the understanding of history, politics, and society. While this work endeavors to illuminate methods and concepts that come from a wide variety of scholarly disciplines, the study of memory is inherently an examination of the relationship of the present to the past, and so historical methods will figure prominently in the analysis.
When it is possible to do archival research again, Petrone hopes to conduct research for her next book, tentatively entitled War Memory, National Mobilization, and Gender in the Soviet Union and Russia, 1945-2000, which extends her analysis of war memory back into the Soviet and
immediate post-Soviet periods. Together, these two books demonstrate the trajectory from Soviet post-WWII celebrations of patriotism, heroism, and manliness that upheld Soviet rule to a more democratic war memory during the revolutionary years of 1985-2000. In this more open era, war memory undermined notions that war is patriotic, heroic, and manly, and allowed more sober assessments of war to emerge in the public sphere. Since 2000, Putin’s government has been reconsolidating the power that had been dispersed by this political revolution. Contemporary Russian war memory has reinforced the remilitarization, reheroization, and remasculinization of the Russian nation. This research shows that war memory is an essential tool in upholding both Soviet and post-Soviet authoritarian rule and in making war “thinkable” in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Books:
- Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
- The Great War in Russian Memory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Edited Volumes:
- Everyday Life in Russia, Past and Present, Indiana University Press, 2015
- Guest Editor, Russian Studies in History, Volume 42, No. 2: Soviet Mass Culture, Fall 2003.
- Guest Editor with Choi Chatterjee, Left History, Volume Six, Number Two: Essays from the conference "Inventing the Soviet Union: Language, Power and Representation, 1917-1945." York, Ontario: Fall 1999.
Scholarly Articles and Review Essays:
- With Choi Chatterjee, "Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective, Slavic Review, 2008.
- “‘All Quiet’ on the Don and the Western Front: Mikhail Sholokhov and Erich Maria Remarque Respond to World War I,” in The Human Tradition in Modern Europe, edited by Cora Granata and Cheryl Koos, Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
- “Motherland Calling: National Symbols and the Mobilization for War,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, edited by Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, Yale University Press, March 2008.
- “Soviet Women’s Voices in the Stalin Era,” Review Essay, Journal of Women’s History, Summer 2004.
- “Imperial and Soviet Masculine Heroes and Patriotic Cultures,” in Russian Masculinities, edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey, Palgrave, 2002.
- "Gender and Heroes: The Exploits of Soviet Pilots and Arctic Explorers in the 1930s" in Women and Political Change: Perspectives from East-Central Europe, edited by Sue Bridger, St. Martin’s Press, 1998, pp. 7-26.
- "Family, Masculinity, and Heroism in Russian Posters of the First World War" in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1880-1930, edited by Billie Melman, Routledge, 1998, pp. 95-119.