Anna Krylova
Anna Krylova is an associate professor at Duke in the Department of History with a joint appointment in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She has written on questions of historical and social theory, gender theory, socialist feminism, Western and Soviet Marxism, as well as modern Russia and challenges posed in envisioning a socialist alternative in the age of industrial, post-industrial, and post-colonial modernity. She is the author of Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (2010), the winner of the 2011 AHA Herbert Baxter Adams Prize. She is currently working on two book projects. One, History-Writing or Sleepwalking Through History in Neoliberal Times, is a collection of essays that rethinks American historians’ encounter with the poststructuralist intellectual project and explores the analytical and political price the discipline has paid for the poststructuralist upgrade of its analytics. The other is a new cultural history of Soviet Russia, provisionally titled Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century. Her most recent publications include “Foucault, Poststructuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History,” Modern Intellectual History, May 2024; “Marx and the Many Lives of Marxism in 20th the 21st Centuries,” Social History, May 2024; and “Agency and History,” American Historical Review, June 2023; “Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century,” Social History, August 2017; and “Legacies of the Cold War and the Future of Gender in Feminist Histories of Socialism” (2021). To arrange talk and lecture events, contact krylova@duke.edu.
Address: History Department
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708
Address: History Department
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708
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Videos/Online Events by Anna Krylova
https://unc.zoom.us/j/95785635647
Abstract: Over the past forty years, the Marxist intellectual tradition has served the discipline of history as a privileged site of critical interrogations into what scholars have come to characterize as simplistic approaches to the study of history. In the US, in the 1980s and 1990s, the front row in this influential conversation, led by pioneers of poststructuralist analysis, was assigned to the most recent academic encounter with Marxism. The 1960s and 1970s British and American schools of social history were criticized for holding a set of naïve presuppositions characteristic of Marxism more generally, namely, the naïve belief in the historical protagonist whose engagement with the knowable world was, according to critics, uncomplicated with considerations of cultural mediation. By the beginning of the new century, even those who wrote to counter the emergent mainstream consensus could not help but agree that Marxism had become a “name for everything that now seemed to have been superseded.” In the counter plot I am proposing, the story does not end with the demise of Marxism. I argue that the kind of Marxist historical theory that was developed by Marxist scholars in the second half of the twentieth century has played a critical even if unacknowledged—that is, latent—role in the making of contemporary fields of social and cultural history in the U S. What proved to be particularly durable was precisely what the Marxist academic tradition allegedly lacked, that is, Marxist insights into such fundamental dilemmas of historical analysis as the problem of socio-cultural mediation and the challenges this theory posed to the concept of human agency in history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmyXM9P1ll4
The link for the discussion recording https://history.duke.edu/news/methods-lab-anna-krylova-history-and-agency
Presenters: Dr. Anna Krylova, Dr. Malachi Hacohen, Vivien Tejada, and Dr. Prasenjit Duara. The panel was chaired by Dr. Jehangir Malegam.
Lecture at Global Capitalism and the Worlds of Socialism Online Conference, HKU, April 2021.
Articles by Anna Krylova
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244324000088
Anna Krylova, Agency and History
Responses to Krylova's Agency and History by William Sewell, Judith Walkowitz, Geoff Eley, Angela Zimmerman, Vivien Tejada
Anna Krylova's response to the critics, "Ideology, Power, and the Phantom of Agency."
https://unc.zoom.us/j/95785635647
Abstract: Over the past forty years, the Marxist intellectual tradition has served the discipline of history as a privileged site of critical interrogations into what scholars have come to characterize as simplistic approaches to the study of history. In the US, in the 1980s and 1990s, the front row in this influential conversation, led by pioneers of poststructuralist analysis, was assigned to the most recent academic encounter with Marxism. The 1960s and 1970s British and American schools of social history were criticized for holding a set of naïve presuppositions characteristic of Marxism more generally, namely, the naïve belief in the historical protagonist whose engagement with the knowable world was, according to critics, uncomplicated with considerations of cultural mediation. By the beginning of the new century, even those who wrote to counter the emergent mainstream consensus could not help but agree that Marxism had become a “name for everything that now seemed to have been superseded.” In the counter plot I am proposing, the story does not end with the demise of Marxism. I argue that the kind of Marxist historical theory that was developed by Marxist scholars in the second half of the twentieth century has played a critical even if unacknowledged—that is, latent—role in the making of contemporary fields of social and cultural history in the U S. What proved to be particularly durable was precisely what the Marxist academic tradition allegedly lacked, that is, Marxist insights into such fundamental dilemmas of historical analysis as the problem of socio-cultural mediation and the challenges this theory posed to the concept of human agency in history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmyXM9P1ll4
The link for the discussion recording https://history.duke.edu/news/methods-lab-anna-krylova-history-and-agency
Presenters: Dr. Anna Krylova, Dr. Malachi Hacohen, Vivien Tejada, and Dr. Prasenjit Duara. The panel was chaired by Dr. Jehangir Malegam.
Lecture at Global Capitalism and the Worlds of Socialism Online Conference, HKU, April 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244324000088
Anna Krylova, Agency and History
Responses to Krylova's Agency and History by William Sewell, Judith Walkowitz, Geoff Eley, Angela Zimmerman, Vivien Tejada
Anna Krylova's response to the critics, "Ideology, Power, and the Phantom of Agency."