Goldman, Leah

Leah Goldman is a cultural historian of the Soviet Union. At Reed, she teaches courses on European cultural politics and the concept of revolution in Russian and Soviet history, as well as modern European humanities. Her further teaching interests include Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cultural and social history, arts and resistance/revolution, comparative Cold War culture, European avant-gardes, socialist aesthetics, and empire and cultural hegemony in Central Asia. Leah’s research focuses on the complexities of the censorship of cultural production, particularly classical music, in the Soviet Union during the Stalin and Khrushchev eras. Her book manuscript in progress investigates collaborative creativity and collective professional self-censorship among Soviet composers during the late-Stalinist repression of the intelligentsia. Leah has presented her research at a variety of national and international conferences, and her article “Negotiation ‘Historical Truth’: Art Authority, and Iurii Shaporin’s The Decembrists” was recently published in Journal of Musicology. Leah is the recipient of the 2016 Robert C Tucker/Stephen F Cohen Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and History, and has previously been awarded a Mellon-Council For European Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant. She received her PhD in Russian and Soviet History from the University of Chicago in 2015.