Jeff Hass Awarded NEH Fellowship

Professor Jeff Hass, Associate Professor of Sociology has been awarded a full year fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to work on his book about human conditions in wartime Russia.  He is one of only four recipients of this fellowship for 2014-2015 in Virginia, announced earlier this month.

Support will be provided for Dr. Hass’ project “A Siege Mentality:  Practices and Politics of Surviving War in the Blockade of Leningrad.”  Using the Blockade of Leningrad (1941-44) as a topic and case study, he will analyze human behavior under extreme wartime duress.  Suffering and challenges of survival included starvation, mass death, and the uncertainty of war.  Responses to these stressors varied by gender, class, occupation, and education.  Dr. Hass will use sources that are both personal and official, such as wartime diaries, memoirs, interviews, and official Party and state documents (including investigations, propaganda, and policy discussions).  He will study how Leningraders reevaluated their norms, identities and practices as they sought meaning and dignity in their troubled lives.  This work will complete his book manuscript, Fields of War and the Self, which has been invited for submission by a prominent university press.

Dr. Hass has taught at the University of Richmond since 2006 after several years as a Lecturer at the University of Reading in the UK. He is a part-time lecturer at St. Petersburg State University, Russia.  He holds a degree in chemistry from Harvard (where he also did significant coursework in Soviet history and domestic policy), and an MA and PhD in Sociology from Princeton.  The most recent of his several books was Power, Culture, and Economic Change in Russia, 1988-2000: To the Undiscovered Country of Post-Socialism (2011) which was nominated for prizes by the American Sociological Association and the Association for the Study of Eurasian and East European Studies.

The National Endowment for the Humanities supports a wide variety of projects in the humanities, including research fellowships and awards for faculty, traveling exhibitions, the preservation of humanities collections at smaller institutions, and training programs to prepare libraries, museums, and archives to preserve and enhance access to their collections.