To: The Wellesley College Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson
Re: Distinguished Faculty Lecture 2024
Date: February 22, 2024
I am delighted to announce that Nina Tumarkin, Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies and professor of history at Wellesley, will deliver this year’s Distinguished Faculty Lecture.
Professor Tumarkin will present “‘Back in the USSR’: The Soviet Legacy in Putin’s Russia” on April 17 at 4:30 p.m. in Collins Cinema, to be followed by a reception on the Davis Plaza. Please register to attend the lecture in person; it will also be livestreamed.
Since coming to the College, Professor Tumarkin has educated generations of Wellesley students about Russian history from the medieval period to the present. She has also taught the history of 20th-century Europe, including a comparative history seminar, HIST 302: World War II as Memory and Myth. Her service to the College has been significant: She has twice been chair of the Department of History and served as longtime director of the College’s dynamic and highly respected Russian Area Studies Program.
In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Professor Tumarkin has stepped in to help our students and our community make sense of the history and geopolitical factors at play in the ongoing war. I want to applaud her for the lectures she has given, guests she has invited, and events she has organized.
Professor Tumarkin’s current research explores Russia’s memory of the Soviet period. She especially focuses on how the memory of World War II resonates in Russian society even as the Kremlin uses it as justification for its war in Ukraine. Her scholarship, she says, examines how various groups “have been remembering, celebrating, commemorating, condemning, condoning, forgetting, ignoring, and grappling with the country’s troubled past and the vastly complex history and legacy of the Soviet experience in World War II and its fateful aftermath.”
An accomplished scholar, Professor Tumarkin has presented at conferences and published widely. She is the author of two books, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia and Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia.
For decades, Professor Tumarkin has also held an affiliation with Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, where she has pursued research, participated in seminars, and presented on panels.
In the 1980s, she served as an advisor to President Ronald Reagan, briefing him and key cabinet members before his historic first meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985 at the Geneva Summit.
Sponsored by the Office of the President, the Distinguished Faculty Lecture was established in 1999 to provide an opportunity for the College’s accomplished and respected faculty members to deliver a public lecture that allows the community to reflect on the meaning of a liberal arts education.
Please join us for a lecture that I know will be both timely and engaging.
