AHR Conversation History after the End of History: Reconceptualizing the Twentieth Century

Anna Krylova is an intellectual historian and award-winning author specializing in Modern Russian history, gender history, and historical and social theory. She has written extensively on questions of American historiography, social theory, socialist feminism, Western and Soviet Marxism, as well as modern Russia and the history of Soviet socialism. Her book Soviet Women in Combat (Женщина, социализм и война, Russian edition, 2026) won the 2011 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association. Her forthcoming book, History-Writing or Sleepwalking Through History in Neoliberal Times, 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. Her current book project is a new intellectual history of Soviet Russia, provisionally titled Imagining Socialism in the Soviet Century.

She also co-organizes, together with Oscar Sanchez-Sibony and Roman Gilmintinov, The ABC of Socialism, an international workshop series that rethinks the postwar history of Soviet and Eastern European socialisms through the key concepts that structured their theory and practice: planning, value, welfare, inequality, nature, growth, scientific-technological revolution, global markets, knowledge, beauty, individuality and collectivity, among others.

Her most recent publications include "Looking for Class in the Postwar Soviet Union," in Emily Elliott and James Nealy, eds., Soviet Workers in the World (Bloomsbury, 2026); “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; “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). Many of her publications are accessible at https://duke.academia.edu/AnnaKrylova.

She has been Fellow at the National Humanities Center; George Kennan Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Fellow at Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and visiting scholar at the Institute of Eastern European History at Tubingen University (Germany). Her work has been supported by the Mellon Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop Fellowship, SSRC, and IREX.

Degrees:

Ph.D., History, 2001, Johns Hopkins University. 

M.A., History, 1998, Johns Hopkins University.

M.A., Political Science, 1995, Johns Hopkins University.

Awards and Honors

Fellow, National Humanities Center, 2013-2014.

Member, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Spring Term, 2013.

2011 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association, awarded for the best first book in European history.

2008-2009 Mellon Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop Fellowship, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University.

2006-2010 Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History, Duke University.

2005-2002 Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

1998-1999 Social Science Research Council Dissertation Write-up Grant.

1999 Stulman Graduate Student, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University.

1997-1998 IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Fellowship.

1997-1998 Pre-Dissertation Fellowship Award, Association for Women in Slavic Studies.