Dr Susan Morrissey

Senior Lecturer in Modern Russian History

Email
s.morrissey@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Phone Number
020 7679 8760

Fax
none

I grew up in the north-east of the United States, moving between Vermont, New York City, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. After receiving a BA in Russian Studies from Oberlin College, I first visited the USSR at an especially fascinating time, the very early years of the Gorbachev era - a period of anti-alcohol campaigns, the Chernobyl disaster, and the 'Good-Will Games'. I then began my doctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where Reginald Zelnik inspired me to focus on the late imperial period, and received my PhD in 1993. In 1998, after living and teaching in several countries, I moved to London and began to teach at SSEES.

Research Interests
I work on the boundaries between social, cultural, and political history and am especially interested in interdisciplinary approaches. My first book, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (Oxford University Press: New York & Oxford, 1998), concerned the student movement (and student radicalism of the left and right more broadly) in early twentieth-century Russia, paying particular attention to the genesis and significance of political mythologies. While researching this book, I came across a large body of archival sources on youth suicide in the period 1905-1914 and soon decided to write my second book on this topic. As I began to research it, however, I became increasingly interested in suicide over the longue durée. The result was my second monograph, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge & New York, 2006), which explores the history of suicide in Russia from the earliest medieval sources to 1914. It combines a specific set of arguments about Russian culture, society, and politics with broader ones about secularization, modernity, and the phenomenon of suicide more generally.

Teaching and supervision
I teach BA and MA courses on the history of Russia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including an introductory survey of Russian history since 1856, a special subject entitled 'Mass Culture in an Age of Revolution', and an MA seminar entitled, 'The Soviet Project: Remaking Man Under the Bolsheviks'. I also contribute sessions to a range of other BA and MA courses, including methodology courses. I have supervised PhD dissertations on topics in Russian and Soviet history and welcome proposals from potential research students interested in Russian history from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. My current research students are working on such diverse topics as the history of the deaf in the Soviet Union, Stalinist film, Ukrainian identity politics 1956-85, Russia's 'nervous age', and concepts of time in the Russian revolutionary movement.

Current Research
I am currently beginning a new research project, 'Political Violence in Russia, 1901-1911', which has received a three-year British Academy Research Development Award. This project explores the relationship between revolutionary terrorism, state-sponsored violence, and culture and media in Russia. It is framed by two seminal dates in the history of Russian terrorism: the inauguration of a new wave of terror with the 1901 assassination of the minister of education; and the last major terrorist act of the era, the 1911 assassination of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin. In the long term, I am planning another book project, tentatively entitled 'The Life and Death of Elizaveta D'iakonova'. This monograph will explore D'iakonova's self-fashioning (especially through her well-known diaries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and her posthumous makeover into 'a typical Russian girl' (as she was often called by contemporary and more recent commentators). It considers broader issues about gender, subjectivity, and autobiography in late imperial Russia with a particular focus on the relationship between love, science, and nervous illness.

Recent Publications

This page last modified Tuesday 25 May 2010.