Field Under Constraint: Soviet Literary Journals and Autonomy in Soviet Literary Life
Dissertation, 2025. ProQuest link.
In this work I examine how autonomy in cultural production can emerge and be sustained within institutions expressly designed to suppress it. Focusing on six major Soviet literary journals between 1956 and 1990, the dissertation argues that autonomy in Soviet literature was not confined to dissident or underground activity but was embedded in official institutions themselves. Drawing on archival records, editorial correspondence, interviews, and a large bibliographic dataset (more than 35,300 publications), it demonstrates that journals developed distinctive repertoires and discretionary strategies in response to shifting political campaigns, institutional ambiguities, and audience expectations.
Theoretically, the study integrates Bourdieu’s field theory with insights from theories of gradual institutional change. It shows that autonomy was relational, incremental, and situational, devised through the contradictions between political authority and literary legitimacy, and sustained through editorial practices of discretion. By combining structural analysis with qualitative case studies of Iunost’, Znamia, and Oktiabr’, the dissertation reveals how journals transformed their assigned role as instruments of ideological dissemination into precarious yet durable sites of innovation and change. More broadly, it demonstrates that authoritarian systems are never fully closed. The very institutions designed to enforce conformity generated contradictions that enabled autonomy.
Freedom Gained and Freedom Lost in American Science
Chapter in Noncoercive Threats to Academic, Political, and Economic Freedom, Columbia University Press, 2025
Co-author: Jonathan R. Cole
Editors: Akeel Bilgrami & Jonathan R. Cole
About the book: “States and institutions in both conventionally authoritarian and formally democratic societies overtly circumscribe freedom in any number of ways. Yet there are also subtler forms by which authorities and cultural forces compromise the choices of individuals in ways that do not seem, at first glance, to be coercive. This book brings together a distinguished set of scholars to examine covert constraints on academic, political, and economic freedom from a variety of angles, developing surprising and timely new insights.”
Relying on oral histories recorded in the early 1980s, “Freedom Gained and Freedom Lost in American Science” explores the ways American female scientists experienced freedom and unfreedom at academic institutions in the years leading up to the Second World War. We argue that the histories and careers of women in science during that period were not simply histories of discrimination and exclusion. Practicing female scientists were more likely to experience the paradox of institutional particularism and individual universalism, carve out islands of freedom on the margins of institutional structures, and shape their scientific identities in relation to other scientists, but not institutions.
Gendering of Academic Disciplines
Chapter in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Education and Gender, SAGE, 2025
Co-author: Joan Robinson
Editors: Elizabeth E. Blair & Sherry L. Deckman
In this article, we contest the commonly held belief that women's advancement in academia has been gradual and progressive, instead highlighting the uneven progression of women's representation, closely influenced by political, cultural, and economic factors. We trace how women's participation in academia fluctuated dramatically across the 19th and 20th centuries and explain how factors such as financial pressures on universities, World War II, the post-war GI Bill, and anti-nepotism policies alternatively expanded and restricted women's opportunities. The authors highlight that even after achieving gender parity in most fields by 2000, contemporary female academics continue to face a "leaky pipeline" due to gender-biased student evaluations, disproportionate service assignments, motherhood penalties, and the challenge of "clashing clocks" between reproductive and tenure timelines.
Soviet Journals Content and Authors, 1956-1990
Database. GitHub (English). Dataverse (Russian)
The database contains authors and titles of works published in 2477 issues of the literary journals Novy Mir, Oktyabr’, Znamya, Zvezda, Nash Sovremennik, and Iunost’ in 1955-1990. The database also includes data on the genres of published works, birth and death dates, and gender of authors. For some authors, party affiliation is given. The dataset is publicly available via GitHub. (observations: 40481; variables: 27)
Strategizing Success: Organizational Innovation and Literary Prominence in the Soviet Union
Conference Paper
This paper examines the organizational dynamics underlying the success of the Soviet journal Iunost’ within the restrictive confines of the Soviet literary field. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset comprising contents from Iunost’ and other Soviet literary journals spanning the period from the 1950s to 1990, the study employs a two-mode network analysis to unravel the intricacies of Iunost's strategic success. Rather than viewing Iunost’ solely through the lenses of literature or journalism, this study redefines Iunost’ as an organizational entity characterized by unique administrative strategies. It posits that Iunost's ascendancy cannot be solely ascribed to its content or targeted audience appeal but rather emanates from innovative management approaches that diverged significantly from the prevailing norms in other journals. Through emphasizing the critical significance of strategic organizational maneuvering in determining journal success within the ideological and heteronomous literary environment, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the multifaceted dynamics that shaped the Soviet literary field.
Scientific vs Personal: the Subjective Experience of Cold War Academic Exchanges - in progress
Daria Franklin and Aleksandr Fokin
Relying on a set of ego-documents produced by Soviet and American participants in a scholarly exchange program and an investigation of the participants’ professional futures we combine comparative-historical methods and microhistory to explore what it meant to be an alien resident scholar on the other side of the Cold War divide in the late 1950s and 1970s. By conceiving US-USSR academic exchanges as a field where political agendas of the nation-states coexisted with individual projects, we aim to look beyond the ways the two conflicting states understood and measured the value of scholarly exchanges. Personal experiences and histories of participating scholars are insignificant traces of various minor events. Yet they allow us to see the course of large-scale political and social events through a different lens. In providing new - sometimes unexpected - knowledge of the experience of crossing the Cold War boundary, these investigations of the personal contribute not only to historical discussions of a major political and ideological conflict, but also to our understanding of state cultures in contested political environments.
American Women of Science: Shaping Meritorious Selves - in progress
Daria Franklin
By examining a large set of interviews with female scientists representing different cohorts, this paper traces the changes in the ways women fashioned their professional identities in relation to the dominant ideologies within science. I find that since the mid-1950s, as the legitimacy of institutional discrimination began to erode, the logic of merit-based model became the only legitimate mechanism of allocation of rewards and authority in science. Realized as quantifiable measures of scientific output, merit-based model shaped the dispositions of female scientists, but masked the opportunities to challenge the existing gendered power distribution in science.