Professor Jeffrey Burds

Professional Background

Jeffrey Burds received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University, and his M. Phil. and M.A. in history from the same institution. During his fellowship at the Museum, he was Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University. For his Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship for Archival Research, Professor Burds conducted research for his project, “Idioms of Hate: Soviet Collaborators in the German War against ‘Jewish-Bolshevism.’”

Professor Burds has published widely on Ukrainian nationalism, Soviet counter-insurgency, and the Soviet secret police. He is the author of Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861-1905 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) and two books in Russian: Soviet Police Informants: Essays on the History of the USSR during the Postwar Years, 1944-1948 (Sovremennaia Istoriia, 2006); and Espionage and Nationalism: The Early Years of the Cold War in Western Ukraine (1944-1948) (Sovremennaia Istoriia, 2008). Professor Burds has published numerous articles on various aspects of Soviet counter-insurgency policy, Ukrainian nationalism, and Soviet archival practices. Among these are “Sexual Violence in Europe in World War II,” Politics & Society, which was forthcoming at the time of his tenure; “The Soviet War against ‘Fifth Columnists:’ The Case of Chechnya, 1942-1944,” Journal of Contemporary History (2007); and “Ethnicity, Memory, and Violence: Reflections on Special Problems in Soviet & East European Archives,” in Archives, Documentation, and the Institutions of Social Memory (University of Michigan Press, 2006). He was principal investigator for the Soviet Archive Project, a joint collaborative effort with Russian scholars and archivists to produce and publish detailed inventories of archival collections in Moscow. At the time of his tenure, the Project had published fourteen guides to post-Soviet archives. Professor Burds is the recipient of numerous awards, including postdoctoral research grants from the Social Science Research Council, IREX, the Holocaust Educational Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He has presented over fifty scholarly papers on a variety of topics both in the U.S. and abroad, and has conducted extensive research in Russian and Ukrainian archives.

Fellowship Research

During his tenure at the Center, Professor Burds pursued his study of civilian collaboration in German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union during World War II. He examined the Museum’s collections of Ukrainian war crimes files from the State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, leaflets and posters from German-occupied zones in the East, and key collections from provincial archives in German-occupied zones of the former Soviet Union.

Professor Burds was in residence at the Mandel Center from May 1 to July 30, 2008.