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Abby M Schrader Professor of History, Department Chair of History

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Biography

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and migrated all of thirteen miles to the island of Manhattan to enroll at Columbia College of Columbia University as a member of its first coed class. I became fascinated by Russian culture and history when I read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment during my freshman year; although I had always assumed that I would become an American historian, this, plus the raging Cold War convinced me to learn more about the Russian and Soviet world. One Russian history course later (taught by F&M alum Jonathan Sanders) and I was hooked. And the rest, as they say, is history. I went on to take numerous undergraduate and graduate seminars in Russian studies during my undergraduate career and had the wonderful opportunity of studying at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, UK during my junior year, which acquainted me with the world of historiography. During my junior year abroad, I also made my first (of about a dozen) visits to the former Soviet Union-even though I had no real Russian under my belt, I had a fascinating time journeying to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and much of Central Asia. This trip inspired me to begin studying Russian during my senior year at Columbia, and I followed that up with a crash course that I continued at Middlebury College. Armed with five years of Russian (acquired, Stalin-style in four), I went off to grad school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, where I studied Russian, European History, and Cultural and Gender Studies. And, returning full circle to my undergraduate interest in crime and punishment, and melding it with my interests in political and cultural history, history of law, and history of the body, I started working on my dissertation, which I edited into a book, The Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia, that I published in 2002.

I arrived at F&M in 1996, right after I received my degree from Penn.  At F&M, my teaching reflects my interests in Russian/Soviet and 18th- and 19th-century European history.  I incorporate issues related to culture (including literary and visual culture), gender and sexuality, politics broadly conceived, and social trends in all of my courses.  I regularly craft topics and seminar courses that tie into my research interests-Social Discipline and Social Deviance: The Construction of Modern European Subjectivity is one example; look for courses on Siberia, exile, empire, and urban history (perhaps centered on St. Petersburg) in the future, since I'm finishing up a project titled "Settling Siberia: Conflicted Identity in the Colonial Process" right now and about to embark on a new study on the construction of St. Peterburg as the locus of modernity.

Professional Service:
  • Chair, Department of History, Franklin & Marshall College (2004-2007)
  • Coordinator, "Peopling the Periphery: Russian Settlers in Eurasia." The Ohio State University, co-coordinated with Nicholas Breyfogle (Ohio State University) and Willard Sunderland (University of Cincinnati), September 2001
  • Member, Screening Committee, Summer Stipend Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2000-2001, 2004-present
  • Member, Screening Committee, International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council/American Council of Learned Societies, 1998-2001
  • Member, Program Committee in Judaic Studies, Franklin & Marshall College, 1998-1999
  • Representative, Faculty Council, Franklin & Marshall College, 1997-1999
  • Member, Program Committee in Women's Studies, Franklin & Marshall College, 1997-1999
  • Member, Writing Requirement Committee, Franklin & Marshall College, 1997- 1998
  • Vice-Chair for Student Affairs, Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, University of Pennsylvania, 1992-1993
  • Founder and Coordinator, Graduate Women's Research Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania, 1990-1992
  • Coordinator, Seventh Annual National Graduate Women's Studies Conference, University of Pennsylvania, 1989-1990
  • Coordinator, Graduate and Professional Women's Organization, University of Pennsylvania, 1989-1991
  • Graduate Student Representative, Women's Center Advisory Board, University of Pennsylvania, 1989-1996
Professional Affiliations:
  • American Association of University Professors
  • American Historical Association
  • American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies
  • Association for Women in Slavic Studies
  • Berkshire Conference of Women's Historians
  • Delaware Valley Association of Russian Historians
Foreign Languages:
  • Russian-Near-native fluency
  • French-Strong reading knowledge
  • Hebrew-Reading fluency, proficient speaking ability

Education 

  • Ph.D., History, 1996
    University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
    Dissertation: "The Languages of the Lash: The Russian Autocracy and the Reform of Corporal Punishment, 1817-1893"
  • M.Phil. with Distinction, History, 1991 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
    Primary fields: Russian History, 1649-1937; European History, 1715-1918; Comparative Women's History; Feminist Theory; Cultural Studies
  • M.A., History, 1989 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
  • A.B., History magna cum laude, 1987 Columbia College, New York, NY

Grants & Awards

  • Columbia College Women Alumna Achievement Award, 2004
  • Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Grant, 2003
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2002-2003
  • International Research and Exchanges Board Short-Term Research Grant, 2001
  • Faculty Research Grants, Franklin & Marshall College, 1996-2006
  • Social Science Research Council Eurasia Program Post-Doctoral Grant, 1998-2000
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, Summer 1998
  • International Research and Exchanges Board Short-Term Research Grant, 1998
  • International Research and Exchanges Board Short-Term Research Grant, 1997
  • Graduate Essay Prize of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies awarded for "Constructing Imperial Others: Penal Legislation in the Borderlands." Presented at the Annual Meeting of the AWSS at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies Annual Convention, 1996
  • Social Science Research Council, Joint Council on Soviet Successor States Dissertation Writing Grant, 1995-1996
  • The Woodrow Wilson Center-Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies Short-Term Fellowship, 1995
  • American Council of Teachers of Russian Title VIII Research Grant, 1995
  • Women's Studies Dissertation Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 1994-1995
  • International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) Advanced Individual Research Fellowship, Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia, 1993-1994
  • Program to Assess and Revitalize the Social Sciences Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 1992-1993
  • University Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 1991-1992
  • Mellon Pre-Dissertation Grant, University of Pennsylvania, Summer 1991
  • Association of Women Faculty and Administrators Award, University of Pennsylvania. Awarded for coordination of Seventh Annual National Graduate Women's Studies Conference, University of Pennsylvania, 1990
  • Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 1988-1990

Publications

Books:
  • Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History. (Basees/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies).. New York: Routledge, 2007. Collection edited with Nicholas Breyfogle and Willard Sunderland.
  • The Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia. Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002.
Articles:
  • "Unruly Felons and Civilizing Wives: Cultivating Marriage in the Siberian Exile System, 1822-1860," Slavic Review, 66:2, (2007): 230-256.
  • "Spectacles of Subversion: Sexualized Scenarios, Gendered Discourses, and Social Breakdown in Nineteenth-Century Russia," in Setting a New Course in Russian History. Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber, ed. Marsha Siefert, Budapest: Central European University Press (2003): 31-50
  • "Branding the Other/Tattooing the Self: Bodily Inscription Among Convicts in Russia and the Soviet Union," in Written on the Body: the Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan. London: Reaktion Press (1999): 174-192. American imprint published by Princeton University Press (2000): 174-192.
  • "Branding the Exile as Other: Corporal Punishment and the Construction of Boundaries in Mid Nineteenth-Century Russia," in Russian Modernity: History, Languages, Practices, ed. Yanni Kotsonis and David Hoffmann. London/New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press (2000), pp. 19-40.
  • "Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout, 1817-1845." Slavic Review, 56:4, (1997): 613-644.
Encyclopedia Articles:
  • "Civil Death" and "Corporal Punishment" for Supplement to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History, Volume 3, ed. Bruce F. Adams, Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. (forthcoming)
  • "Punishment" for The Encyclopedia of European Social History, ed. Peter N. Stearns, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (2001), Volume 3, pp. 413-427.
Book Reviews:
  • Review of Cathy A. Frierson, All Russia is Burning: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2002. Canadian Slavonic Papers. Volume 82, Number 3, (July 2004): 760-762.
  • Review of Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman and Dan Healey, eds. Russian Masculinities in History and Culture New York: Palgrave Press, 2000. Slavic Review. Volume 62, Number 2, (Summer 2003): 383-384.
  • Review of Irina Reyfman, Ritualized Violence Russian Style, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Social History. Volume 27, Number 1, (January 2002): 51-52.
  • Review of Stephen P. Frank. Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856-1914. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Journal of Modern History. Volume 72, Number 4, (December 2000):1072-4.
  • Review of Jonathan W. Daly. Autocracy Under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866-1905. Dekalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998. Law and History Review, (Fall 2000):671-3.
  • Review of Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds. Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Canadian American Slavic Studies, 34:2, (Summer 2000):211-213.
  • Review of Paul Josephson. New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, The Siberian City of Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. East West Education, 18:2, (1997):197-201.
Works in Progress:
  • "Settling Siberia: Conflicted Identity in the Colonial Process, 1822-1867" (series of articles)
  • The Making and Remaking St. Petersburg (series of articles)

Presentations

  • "Market Order and Disorder in Nineteenth-Century St. Petersburg," American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 34th Annual National Convention, Toronto, Canada, November, 2003.
  • "Russians ‘Gone Native': Sexualized Order and Disorder in Nineteenth-Century Siberia, Recontextualizing Women's Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY, April 2003. (invited presentation)
  • "The Return of the Repressed: Liminality and Status in Siberian Exile," American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 32nd Annual National Convention, Crystal City, Virginia, 2002.
  • "Spectacles of Subversion: Corporal Punishment, Domestic Abuse, and Socio-Sexual Breakdown in Nineteenth-Century Russia," Davis Center for Russian Studies, Harvard University, October, 2001. (invited presentation)
  • "Settling Siberia: Status and the Nineteenth-Century Exile System," VI World Congress for Central and East European Studies, Tampere, Finland, 2000.
  • "From Convicts to Colonists: Status, Gender, and Ethnicity in the Exile System, 1810-1855," Barnard College and Harriman Institute of Advanced Russian Studies, Columbia University, New York, NY, 2000. (invited presentation)
  • "Settling Siberia: Conflicted Identities in the Colonial Process," Advanced Study Center of the International Institute at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Seminar "Empires, States, and Political Imagination," Ann Arbor, MI, 2000. (invited presentation)
  • "Lawless Vagabonds and Civilizing Wives: The Official Cult of Domesticity and the Exile Problem in Nineteenth-Century Siberia," American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 31st Annual Convention, St. Louis, MO, 1999
  • "Reconceptualizing the Language of Punishment: the Naturalization of Woman as Other in the 1863 Penal Reform," Russian and East European Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, 1999. (invited presentation)
  • "Engendering Punishment, Embodying Gender: Russian Officials and the 1863 Exemption of Women From Corporal Punishment," Eleventh Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, University of Rochester, 1999
  • "Inventing the Organic: Russian Approaches to Law in the Age of Nicholas I," American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 30th Annual Convention, Boca Raton, FL, 1998
  • "From the Language of Spectacle to the Idiom of Rehabilitation: Nikolai Semenovich Mordvinov's Critique of Corporal Punishment," presented at Conference on Jeremy Bentham and Russia, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, May 1998
  • "The Ambiguous Spectacle of Punishment," presented at Berkeley Symposium on the Spectacles of Death in Modern Russia, University of California-Berkeley, 1998
  • "Imagining Siberia: The Sibirskii Komitet and the Contemplation of Categories in Russia, 1822-1867," American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 29th Annual Convention, Seattle, WA, 1997
  • "The Languages of Punishment and the Limits of the Reform: The Russian Autocracy and the 1863 Amelioration of Corporal Punishment," American Society for Legal History Annual Convention, Minneapolis, MN, 1997
  • Containing the Spectacle of Punishment: The Russian Autocracy and the Abolition of the Knout, 1817-1845," American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 28th Annual Convention, Boston, MA, 1996
  • "Branding the Exile as 'Other': Corporal Punishment and the Construction of Boundaries in the Siberian Penal System, 1828-1852," Working Group on Theory in Russian History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA, 1996
  • "Engendering Punishment, Structuring Citizenship: The Russian Autocracy and Corporal Punishment Reform, 1841-1863," American Historical Association Annual Convention, Atlanta, GA, 1996
  • "Public and Private and the Punishment of Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia," Delaware Valley Association of Russian Historians, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, 1995
  • "Of Myths, Motherhood, and Moral Breakdown: The Russian Autocracy Studies the Public Corporal Punishment of Women, 1855-1863," American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Mid-Atlantic Branch, New York, NY, 1995
  • "The Embodiment and Gendering of Citizenship: Russian Elites and Eighteenth- Century European Philosophy," Western Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, UC-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 1993
  • "Kommunistka: The Soviet Positive Heroine-A Case Study in Russian Gender Role Construction," American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, New England Branch, Cambridge, MA, 1992
  • "The Soviet Positive Heroine, 1919-1928," Popular Culture Association, San Antonio, TX, 1991
  • "Gender: A Category of Analysis for the Frankfurt School?" Eighth Annual National Graduate Women's Studies Conference, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 1991
  • "Bolshevik Policy. Peasant Byt. A Matter of Discourse," Ivy League Student Conference on Russian/Soviet Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1988