Dr. Vera Kaplan
Dr. Vera Kaplan is a senior lecturer in the Department of History and Director of the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies, Tel Aviv University. Her research interests lie in the areas of cultural and social history and the history of education in Russia, focusing especially on the voluntary associations and history as a profession. Her book Historians and Historical Societies in the Public Life of Imperial Russia was published by Indiana University Press in March 2017 (reviewed in: Russian Review, vol. 77, no. 2 (April 2018): 316-317, by Joseph Bradley; in American Historical Review, vol. 123, no. 3 (June 2018): 1046–1047, by Alexey Miller; in Slavic Review, vol. 77, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 833-834, by Thomas Sanders; and in Vestnik St. Peterburgskogo universiteta: Istoriia, vol. 64, no. 1 (2019): 304-310, by Anton Sveshnikov).
She wrote some articles and book chapters devoted to the history of the Russian revolution of 1917, including: “A Dress Rehearsal for Cultural Revolution: Bolshevik Policy towards Teachers and Education between February and October, 1917,” History of Education, Special Issue: Making Education Soviet, 1917–1953, 35, no. 4-5 ( July–September 2006): 427–452, “Recent Israeli Historiography of the 1917 Revolution(s),” Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography, 9, no. 1 (2016): 65-88; and “Historical Societies and Formation of Memory on the February Revolution,” (published in Russian: “Istoricheskie obshchestva i formirovanie pamiati on the February in 1917”) in Boris Kolonitskii and Daniel Orlovskii, eds., Epokha voin i revoliutsii (The Epoch of Wars and Revolutions), (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2017), 37-49. In addition, she co-edited (together with Dr. Dina Moyal) special issue of Zmanim (Times, issued in Hebrew) historical journal devoted to centenary of the Russian Revolution.
Her current research project, entitled “Weathering the revolution,” explores how historians responded to and lived through the great event of their time. The preliminary results of this project have been presented in her articles “Weathering the Revolution: Patronage as a Strategy of Survival,” Revolutionary Russia, 26, no. 2 (2013): 97–127, and “Documenting the Russian Revolution” (In Hebrew: לתעד את המהפכה הרוסית ), Historia, vol. 42, no.1 (2019): 81-114, as well as in the book chapter “What Did Historians Do at the Time of the Great Revolution?” in Matthias Neumann and Andrew Willimott (eds.), Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide (London: Routledge, 2018), 186-214.
