Juliane Fürst

She is a historian of the Soviet and post-Soviet space with a special interest in non-conformism, dissent, and youth culture, as well as the histories of emotions, personal experience, and subjectivities. Her professorship at CEU is a joint appointment with the Center of Contemporary History (ZZF), Potsdam, where she is co-head of the department “Communism and Society.” Her academic career is, however, rooted in the UK, where she studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate, wrote her PhD, and worked in academia for over twenty years. She read history at Christ Church, Oxford, completed a Master of Empire Studies at the LSE, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on Stalin-era youth at the Government Department there. After holding Stipendiary Lecturer and Junior Research Fellowships at Magdalen and St John’s Colleges, Oxford, she joined the University of Bristol in 2007, where she became Senior Lecturer in 2012 and Reader in 2017. She has held visiting fellowships at the Davis Center at Harvard and at the Institute of Advanced Studies at CEU. In 2018 she moved to Germany to take up a research-only position at the ZZF. Yet the magic of the classroom lured her back to teaching, which brought her to CEU and the Department of Historical Studies.

She is currently the Principal Investigator of the project Perestroika from Below, which has a team of five members and three temporary fellows investigating the great reform process that brought down the Soviet system not from the commonly adopted viewpoint of Gorbachev and international diplomacy, but as a grassroots phenomenon. The scope of investigation has been cast wide, both geographically and in terms of content, ranging from beauty contests to organized crime, from nomadic spiritual revival to the politics of museums, and from peace activists to propagators of antisemitism. As a team, they cover territory stretching from Tallinn and Lviv to Almaty and Samarkand. Related to this project, she is also heading a separate team of four postdoctoral researchers investigating perebudova (restructuring) in Ukraine, with particular attention to questions of post- and decolonization and the applicability of these concepts to the (post-)Soviet space.

She is the author of two monographs—Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (OUP, 2010) and Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (OUP, 2021)—as well as several edited volumes, including Dropping out of Stalinism and The Cambridge History of Communism, Vol. III. She has been involved in several public history projects, particularly related to her work on Soviet hippies, which developed a side branch focused on securing participants’ private archives for historical research. This work resulted in an exhibition at the Wende Museum in Los Angeles in 2018 titled Soviet Flower Power and a documentary film by Terje Toomistu, Soviet Hippies, which she co-produced. She is also engaged in a collaborative project with the Universities of Vilnius and Lund and the Center of Contemporary History in Luxembourg (Europast), focusing on knowledge exchange about conducting public history in post-dictatorial societies and in times of challenges to the historical record.