Dr. Christine Varga-Harris
- About
- Education
- Awards & Honors
- Research
Biography
Dr. Varga-Harris received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, her M.A. from the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada), and her B.A. at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Among the undergraduate courses she teaches at ISU are Imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and Society and Daily Life in the East Bloc; she also teaches the graduate topics course Modern Russia (468) and the graduate research seminar (497).
Current Courses
102.003Modern Western Civilization
102.004Modern Western Civilization
234.001Russia From Peter To Lenin: Europeanization, Imperialism & Revolutionary Currents
402.001Seminar In European History
102.001Modern Western Civilization
102.002Modern Western Civilization
366.001Soviet Russia
Teaching Interests & Areas
Russian history from the 800s through the 1990s; postwar/Communist/Cold War Eastern Europe through 1989; gender and imperialism; material and consumer culture
Research Interests & Areas
Russia (especially from 1945-1964/the late Stalin and Khrushchev eras); postwar Eastern Europe; daily life and material culture; Communist ideology and society; gender; Soviet cultural relations with non-aligned countries during the 1950s and 1960s.
Ph D History
MA Russian and East European Studies
BA History
Inspirational and Influential Faculty Member
Inspirational and Influential Faculty Member
Honorable Mention, Barbara Heldt Prize for Best Article in Slavic/East European/Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies
Faculty Research Award
Finalist, University Teaching Initiative Award
Pre-Tenure Faculty Initiative Grant
Finalist, University Research Initiative Award
Book Review
Book, Authored
Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
Book, Chapter
“Moving Toward Utopia: Soviet Housing in the Atomic Age,” in Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West, ed. Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal (Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 133-153.
“Forging Citizenship on the Home Front: Reviving the Socialist Contract and Constructing Soviet Identity During the Thaw,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: A Social and Cultural History of Reform in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (London, UK; New York City: Routledge-Curzon, 2006; 2nd ed., 2009), 101-116.
Journal Article
“Хрущёвка, коммуналка: социализм и повседневность во время ‘Оттепели’,” Новейшая истoрия России [Contemporary History of Russia], nо. 1 (June 2011): 160-166.
“Homemaking and the Aesthetic and Moral Perimeters of the Soviet Home during the Khrushchev Era,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 561-589.
Presentations
“Turning ‘Swamps’ into ‘Flowering Gardens’: Soviet Woman as a Contact Zone between Women in the Soviet Union and those Transitioning from Colonialism in Africa and South Asia,” presented by invitation at the symposium “Contact Zones: Articulating and Practicing Difference,” Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, 23 January 2015
“Orientalism, Soviet-Style: Cultural Exchange and the Inevitability of Communism in the World of Soviet Woman,” presented at the conference “Alternative Encounters: The ‘Second World’ and the ‘Global South’, 1945-1991,” Imre Kertész Kolleg, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany, November 2014