Lewis Siegelbaum, born in New York City, New York, USA, in 1949. Ph.D. from the University of Oxford. Professor of History at Michigan State University, East Lansing.
Fellow (1 September 2007 – 30 June 2008)
CARS FOR COMRADES: THE LIFE OF THE SOVIET AUTOMOBILE
Completing my book, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Cornell University Press) represented my major project at NIAS. In carrying out the final tasks, I was more than ably assisted by the technical and library staffs to whom I am most grateful. I also managed to complete three scholarly articles each of which elaborated on a theme or issue addressed in the book. Rounding out activity related to this project, I presented scholarly papers in Sweden and England, and at conferences in Portugal and Sweden, and organized a scholarly conference on “The Socialist Car” that met at The Berlin Collegium for Comparative European History (BKVGE) in June. The conference brought together a dozen scholars from seven countries to discuss social and cultural practices relating to “automobility” in the erstwhile socialist world of Eastern Europe from the 1950s until the end of the 1980s. Finally, while at NIAS I initiated a project on the Soviet pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958, conducting research for this project at the Archives Générales du Royaume in Brussels and at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and the Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE) in Moscow