Jeffrey Hass receives NEH fellowship to continue research on historic blockade of Leningrad

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a one-year fellowship to Jeffrey Hass, associate professor of sociology at the University of Richmond. The grant will enable Hass to spend the 2014-15 academic year on his project “A Siege Mentality: Practices and Politics of Surviving War in the Blockade of Leningrad.”

Hass has been analyzing human behavior under extreme duress during the prolonged blockade and siege of Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) by German forces during World War II. More than a million casualties resulted from the siege, which lasted 872 days. Using sources that are both personal and official, including wartime diaries, memoirs, interviews, and official state and party documents, he has studied how Leningraders struggled under brutal conditions to find meaning in their lives.

Hass, who lived in Russia during the 1990s and lectures periodically at Saint Petersburg State University, has been researching the project for more than six years, primarily in state archives in Russia. He will spend most of the fellowship year in Richmond completing the book manuscript, “Fields of War and the Self,” which has been invited for submission by a prominent university press.

Hass has taught at the university since 2006 after working from 2000-06 as a lecturer at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, and master’s and doctoral degrees in sociology from Princeton University. His most recent book was “Power, Culture, and Economic Change in Russia: To the Undiscovered Country of Post-Socialism, 1988-2008.”

The NEH supports a wide variety of projects in the humanities, including research fellowships and awards for faculty. Hass is one of four fellowship recipients from Virginia for the coming academic year.

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