History & Art History

Steven A. Barnes joined the George Mason University faculty in 2004. He received his Ph.D. in Russian, Soviet, and East European history from Stanford University in 2003. His book, entitled Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, is due out in November 2010 with Princeton University Press. Death and Redemption reconsiders the history of the Soviet system of forced labor concentration camps and internal exile through memoirs and recently opened archives of the Gulag system. He has done field research in Russia and Kazakhstan. Dr. Barnes’ research has been published in the journals Slavic Review, Kritika, and International Labor and Working Class History. Additionally, with the National Parks Service and the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, he completed a traveling museum exhibit on the history of the Gulag that opened at Ellis Island in May 2006. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Kennan Institute and working with the Center for History and New Media, Dr. Barnes built a website on the history of the Gulag. Information on both these projects can be found at Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives.

Dr. Barnes is now at work on a new book on the Soviet Union in 1968, tentatively titled Where Did the Revolution Go?: 1968 and the Soviet Union in Global Perspective.

Modern Russian and Soviet History, Totalitarianism, Cold War Europe

Russian, Soviet and European History, History of State Violence, History of Concentration Camps, History of the 1960s