Rebecca Manley specializes in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Her book To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War, 1941-1946 (Cornell University Press, 2009) reconstructs the displacement of over sixteen million Soviet civilians in the wake of the German invasion. Based on previously unexploited archival collections in Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, the book offers a novel look at a war that transformed the lives of several generations of Soviet citizens. It was awarded the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, awarded biannually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for an author's first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia's past and the 2010 Heldt Prize, awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies for the best book by a woman in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian studies.
Rebecca is currently working on a book-length project entitled "Tsar Hunger: Conceiving Hunger in Modern Russian History" with the support of a SSHRC insight grant. The project examines the cultural conceptions and political ideas that informed the way Russians responded to hunger from the 1860s through to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It offers a fresh perspective on the place of hunger in modern Russian history by examining the way writers and revolutionaries, political economists and physiologists, government officials and philanthropists conceptualized and attempted to come to grips with hunger.
To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War
Articles and Book Chapters
- “Nutritional Dystrophy: The Science and Semantics of Starvation,” in eds. Don Filtzer and Wendy Goldman, Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II (Indiana University Press, 2015): 206-264.
- “Économie de guerre et encadrement de la société en URSS,” in eds. Alya Aglan and Robert Frank, 1937-1947: la guerre-monde, vol. 2 (Gallimard: 2015), 1504-1542.
- “The Perils of Displacement: The Evacuee between Refugee and Deportee,” Contemporary European History, vol. 16, no. 4 (2007): 495-509.
- “‘Where should we resettle the comrades next?’: The adjudication of housing claims and the construction of the Post-War Order,” in ed. Juliane Furst, Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (Routledge, 2006).
- 2010 Winner of the Heldt Prize, awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies for the best book by a woman in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian studies.
- 2009/2010 Winner of W. Bruce Lincoln Prize, awarded biannually by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for an author's first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia's past.
- 2009 and 2015 Winner, Departmental Award for Excellence in Teaching, Department of History, Queen’s University.
