Karen Petrone's primary research interests are cultural history, gender history, propaganda, representations of war, and the history of subjectivity and everyday life, especially in Russia and the Soviet Union. She is currently completing a book that is tentatively entitled Embattled Memory: World War I Remembrance and the Culture of Soviet Military Mobilization, 1914-1945.  This work broadens her expertise on the culture of the Soviet interwar period, a subject she first explored in her book on Stalinist celebrations in the 1930s.

Both in the project on World War I memory and in a series of other on-going projects, Petrone explores issues of gender. She is co-editing a volume of essays in comparative history with Jie-Hyun Lim of Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea, entitled Gender Politics in Mass Dictatorship: Between Self-empowerment and Voluntary Mobilisation.  She is co-writing an article (with Choi Chatterjee) on the development of gender history in post-Soviet Russia.  She soon hopes to explore the role of gender in Soviet justifications of and the population’s resistance to the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Areas of Specialization

Modern Russian and Soviet History; Cultural History; Gender History.

Books:

• Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Edited Volumes:

• Guest Editor, Russian Studies in History, Volume 42, No. 2:  Soviet Mass Culture, Fall 2003.
• Guest Editor with Choi Chatterjee, Left History, Volume Six, Number Two: Essays from the conference "Inventing the Soviet Union: Language, Power and Representation, 1917-1945." York, Ontario: Fall 1999.

Scholarly Articles and Review Essays:

• With Choi Chatterjee, “Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective,” Slavic Review, Winter 2008.
• “‘All Quiet’ on the Don and the Western Front: Mikhail Sholokhov and Erich Maria Remarque Respond to World War I,” in The Human Tradition in Modern Europe, edited by Cora Granata and Cheryl Koos, Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
• “Motherland Calling: National Symbols and the Mobilization for War,” in Picturing Russia:  Explorations in Visual Culture, edited by Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, Yale University Press, March 2008.
• “Soviet Women’s Voices in the Stalin Era,” Review Essay, Journal of Women’s History, Summer 2004.
• “Imperial and Soviet Masculine Heroes and Patriotic Cultures,” in Russian Masculinities, edited by Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey, Palgrave, 2002.
• "Gender and Heroes: The Exploits of Soviet Pilots and Arctic Explorers in the 1930s" in Women and Political Change: Perspectives from East-Central Europe, edited by Sue Bridger, St. Martin’s Press, 1998, pp. 7-26.
• "Family, Masculinity, and Heroism in Russian Posters of the First World War" in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1880-1930, edited by Billie Melman, Routledge, 1998, pp. 95-119.