Professional Background
Curtis Richardson is currently a researcher at the University of North Carolina and an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland Global Campus. He received a PhD in Russian history in 1999 from Northern Illinois University. His dissertation, “Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin: An Intellectual and Political Biography,” analyzes the role of Kavelin in fostering a nascent civil society in mid-nineteenth-century Russia and his role in the Great Reforms, especially the emancipation of the serfs. His book, Konstantin Kavelin and the Struggle for Emancipation: A Case Study of the Westerners’ Role in the Foundation of Civil Society in Imperial Russia, was published in the University of Pittsburgh’s Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies in 2010.
Dr. Richardson has also authored articles exploring issues of violence, domestic abuse, nationalism, and national identity in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, including: “The Krylov Affair: Domestic Abuse, Venality, Generational Conflict, and the Battle for the New Russia,” in Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 59, no. 3 (2011); “TEZHE: Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Soviet Cosmetics Trust, and the Revolution from Above,” Russian History 51, no. 2–4 (2024); and “Violence and the Family: The Foundations of a New Domesticity and National Identity in Imperial Russia,” in Violence Against Women in Eastern Europe, ed. Marianna Muravyeva (Springer Nature, 2026).
Fellowship Research
As a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellow, Dr. Richardson will conduct research for two projects: a biography of Polina Zhemchuzhina, and an article about the Soviet Jewish letter-writing campaign during the Holocaust and the late Stalinist era. In the first project, he will research Zhemchuzhina’s life in the wake of the Holocaust and the experiences of Soviet Jews during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, which led to the destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Zhemchuzhina’s arrest, and the so-called Doctors’ Plot. In the second project, he will analyze how the letter-writing campaign served as part of the awakening of a Soviet Jewish identity, distinct from the pre-war identity, that increasingly did not privilege Soviet over Jewish identity. Dr. Richardson plans to use the Museum’s Centropa collection, among others, to interrogate these letters along with videos and numerous interviews to discern the process of this awakening and how the letter-writing campaign served as an ersatz civil society in the midst of the war, the Holocaust, and an antisemitic campaign.
Residency Period: November 1, 2026 - April 30, 2027