Teaching and Research Specialties
Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Russia-US Relations, Cold War History, Comparative History of Popular Culture
Biography
A former Soviet expert in US history, especially in the social and cultural history of colonial British America, Sergei Zhuk, moved in 1997 to the United States, defended his new (now American) Ph.D. dissertation about imperial Russian history at Johns Hopkins University in 2002. Since 1997 he taught American colonial history, Russian/Soviet and Ukrainian History at Ball State University, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. His research interests are international relations, knowledge production, cultural consumption, religion, popular culture and identity in a history of imperial Russia, Ukraine and the Soviet Union. Zhuk’s scholarship was awarded with numerous research grants, including Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center in Italy, Fulbright, Mellon Foundation, ACLS, IREX, Petro Jacyk and Tymkiw Ukrainian Studies grants from the University of Toronto and Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Just recently, he was invited as a Fulbright scholar to teach in 2022 in Estonia.
His recent publications include: Ukraine’s Outpost: Dnipropetrovsk and the Russian-Ukrainian War (2022) [Co-editor],The KGB Operations against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine, 1953 – 1991 (2022), Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (2018), Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR: People’s Diplomacy in the Cold War (2017), Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (2010), and Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 (2004).
Currently, he is working on a new book project: "Use Your Enemy": The KGB, Russian Academic Imperialism and Western Academia, 1958-2022.
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