Description

There has been surprisingly little systematic comparison of the Chinese, Kazakh, Ukrainian, and Soviet famines to date. This conference will bring together specialists of these famines to produce a deeper understanding of these phenomena. The presenters, on the basis of their research and knowledge of the rapidly increasing specialized literature, will assess the common features and significant differences and place their findings within the dynamics of the histories of the respective countries.

Speakers:

Lucien Bianco is an eminent French historian and Sinologist specializing in the history of the Chinese peasantry in the 20th century. His Les origines de la révolution chinoise 1915–1949 (1967; published in English in 1971 and subsequently in revised editions) remains a highly regarded signature work. He has also written the award-winning studies Peasants without the Party (2001) and Jacqueries et révolution dans la Chine du Xxe siècle (2005).

Sarah Cameron is assistant professor of Soviet history at the University of Maryland-College Park. She earned her PhD in history at Yale University, where her doctoral work won the John Addison Porter prize for the best dissertation in the arts and sciences. She is working on a book project, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan.

Andrea Graziosi is a professor (on leave) at the Università di Napoli Federico II, an associate of the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (Paris) and a fellow of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. In 2005 he was awarded the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for his studies on the Holodomor. The author of books on Soviet, Eastern European, and Italian history, and the co-chair of the series Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii, Professor Graziosi sits in the editorial boards of numerous academic journals, and has taught and lectured in several European and American universities.

Niccolò Pianciola is Associate Professor of History, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research focused on the history of colonization and decolonization during the late Tsarist Empire and the early Soviet Union, and on the great famine in Kazakhstan. He is currently researching the Aral Sea crisis. His last book (co-edited with Paolo Sartori) is Islam, Society and States across the Qazaq Steppe (18th–Early 20th Centuries) (2013).

Ralph Thaxton is a Professor of Politics at Brandeis University specializing in twentieth-century China. His Salt of the Earth (1997) examined the basis for rural support of Mao’s revolutionary China. His later Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Do Fo Village (2008) studied the social, cultural, and personal impact of the Mao’s policies in rural Chinese areas, notably the issue of famine.

Nicolas Werth is Research Director at the CNRS’s Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent (Paris). Since his first book (Être communiste en URSS sous Staline, 1981), he has written numerous works on Soviet social history, Stalinism and mass violence. He is a co-author of The Black Book of Communism (1998; English edition, 1999). Among his recent books are: L’ivrogne et la marchande de fleurs. Autopsie d’un meurtre de masse, URSS 1937–1938 (2011), L’État soviétique contre la paysannerie ( with A.Berelowitch, 2011), and La Route de la Kolyma (2012). As well, he co-edited the series Istoria stalinskogo Gulaga ( 7 vols., 2004).

Xun Zhou is Lecturer of Modern History at University of Essex and the author of The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: a Documentary History (2012). She is one of an increasing number of historians who are pioneering the history of the People’s Republic of China through new oral and archival evidence. Based on interviews she has collected, her new work, Forgotten Voices: Mao’s Great Famine (1958-1961), is the very first book to record ordinary people’s memories of the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the famine.

Discussants:

Olga Andriewsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, Trent University (Canada). The main focus of her research is the 19th-early 20th century history of Ukraine and the Russian Empire. She also maintains an active interest in the Stalin era and has written about the historiography of the Holdomor. She has taught undergrauduate and graduate courses on Stalin and Stalinism for many years.

Kimberley Manning is Associate Professor of Political Science at Concordia University. Co-editor of Eating Bitterness: New Perspectives on China’s Great Leap Forward and Famine (2011), she has published articles in Modern China, the China Quarterly, and The China Review. Her monograph (under review), “Attachments: Personal Ties and Social Policy Reform in Revolutionary China,” shows how elite and grassroots “party family” networks contributed to the early successes and catastrophic losses of the first decade of the People’s Republic of China.