FACULTY PROFILE

David Brandenberger, assistant professor of history at Richmond since 2003, was awarded 2007-08 research fellowships from the Fulbright program, National Endowment for the Humanities (Summer) and from IREX, the International Research & Exchange Board.

A specialist in Russian and Soviet history with a Ph.D from Harvard, Brandenberger has written on Stalin-era propaganda, ideology and nationalism for a number of journals. His first book, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Harvard University Press, 2002), focuses on the USSR's reliance on russocentric mobilizational propaganda and the effect that this pragmatic use of historical heroes, imagery and iconography had on national consciousness among Russian-speakers, both during the Stalin period and after.

He is presently working on a second major book, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Political Indoctrination and Stalinist Terror, 1928-1939, which explores the USSR's failure to inculcate a sense of communist identity in interwar Soviet society—a fiasco that precipitated the mobilizational exigencies detailed in his other published work. Brandenberger will conduct about seven months of research in the former party and state archives of Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as in several provincial cities working on collaborative research projects with local Russian historians.