Steven E. Harris, Associate Professor of History, was recently awarded an A. Verville Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The 12-month fellowship will allow Harris to work full-time on his second book project, “Wings of the Motherland: Soviet and Russian Cultures of Aviation from Khrushchev to Putin” while in residence at the Museum. Harris will also use the fellowship to conduct research in archives in Moscow.

Steven E. Harris, Associate Professor of History, presented his chapter, “Cold War Friendly Skies: Pan Am, Aeroflot and the Political Economy of Détente,” at the Russian History and Culture Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania on March 18. Harris was invited to present this chapter, which is part of his current monograph project, “Wings of the Motherland: Soviet and Russian Cultures of Aviation from Khrushchev to Putin.”

Department of History and American Science Professor Steven E. Harris presented his paper, “The Soviet Martyrdom of an Aeroflot Stewardess in the Age of Détente,” at the 47^th Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies in Philadelphia, Nov. 19-22, 2015. At this same conference, Harris was also a panelist on the roundtable titled “Motion & Urbanity: Visual Symbolism, Sites of Mobility & the Built Environment in the Tsarist and Soviet Empire,” where he discussed his current work on the history of Soviet airports.

Associate Professor Steven E. Harris from the Department of History and American Studies was recently invited to present his paper, “The Martyrdom of Nadezhda Kurchenko: Murder of an Aeroflot Stewardess and Cold War Displacement,” at the conference “Verschiebung/Displacement/Вымещение im Kalten Krieg,” at the Slavic Department of the University of Zürich, on Nov. 6-7, 2015. Harris’ paper is based on a chapter for his current book project, Wings of the Motherland: Soviet and Russian Cultures of Aviation from Khrushchev to Putin.

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow invited Prof. Steven E. Harris to present his paper “Soviet Airports: Futuristic Gateways to the Socialist City” at its recent conference, “A Long, Happy Life: Building and Thinking the Soviet City: 1956 to Now,” held Oct. 30-31, 2015. This conference is the first event in a three-year project at the Garage Museum to examine the history and legacy of Soviet modernism in architecture and urban planning. Harris’s paper is based on a chapter of his second book, which he is currently researching and writing, Wings of the Motherland: Soviet and Russian Cultures of Aviation from Khrushchev to Putin.

Steven E. Harris, Associate Professor of History, recently traveled to St. Petersburg, where he attended the conference “Living Cities of the Second World,” Feb. 27 to March 1, 2015.

The conference was the third that Harris and Daria Bocharnikova (Harvard University) have organized in the past year for the Second World Urbanity project. The conference featured two days of panel discussions on the history of urban planning, architecture, and the lived experience of socialist cities, not only in the former USSR and Eastern Europe but also Latin America (Managua) and East Africa (Dar es Salaam).

In addition to co-organizing the conference, Harris presented his paper, “Soviet Airports of the 1960s: Futuristic Gateways to Socialist Urbanity,” based on his current research project about the entangled histories of Aeroflot and Pan Am. While in St. Petersburg, he had the opportunity to conduct some research at the National Library and was also invited to speak to high school students at School No. 157, where he previously taught English for a year.