Steven E. Harris
Professor | University of Mary Washington
Fredericksburg, VA, UNITED STATES
Dr. Harris is an expert on modern Russian and European history.
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Biography
As Russia’s resurgent global influence grows—from social media influencing to anti-Western alliances—Steven E. Harris’s expertise in modern Russian and European history has become increasingly sought-after. Harris provides expert analysis on Russia’s political economy during its war of aggression against Ukraine and how the country seeks to reshape geopolitics and achieve expansionist goals. Focusing on Russian aviation, Harris explains how Putin’s regime has adapted to Western sanctions and how Russia’s airlines and aerospace industry are evolving in an era of global economic nationalism.
In addition to teaching courses in UMW’s Department of History and American Studies, Harris is currently writing a book entitled Autocratic Airways: Aeroflot and the Russian Jet Age from Stalin to Putin. Based on extensive archival research in Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S., his book project explores the history of the “world’s largest airline” and how the USSR and now Putin’s Russia have used commercial aviation to forge a unique, illiberal version of the Jet Age. Harris received a Verville Fellowship from the National Air and Space Museum and a Waple Professorship from UMW to advance work on this book, as well as a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Harris is also the author of Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), which examines how Soviet citizens’ move from overcrowded communal housing to single-family apartments fundamentally transformed the post-Stalinist “thaw” from an elite to a mass phenomenon. A list of Harris’s scholarly publications and analyses of contemporary Russian aviation is available on his UMW faculty page.
Areas of Expertise (5)
Russian History
Contemporary Russia
Commercial Aviation
Global Socialism
Aerospace History
Accomplishments (10)
Faculty Sabbatical, University of Mary Washington
Fall 2023
Summer Stipend, National Endowment for the Humanities
Summer 2020
Verville Fellowship, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC
2016-2017
Waple Professorship, University of Mary Washington
2016-2018
Faculty Sabbatical, University of Mary Washington
Fall 2014
Faculty Development Grant, University of Mary Washington
Summer 2012
Bernadotte Schmitt Grant, American Historical Association
Summer 2007
Research Scholar, Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC
2003-2004
Social Sciences Research Council Dissertation Write-up Fellowship
2001-2002
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship`
2000-2001
Education (3)
University of Chicago: Ph.D., History 2003
University of Chicago: M.A., History 1998
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: B.A., Political Science with Honors and History 1995
Links (2)
Media Appearances (7)
The Russian Aviation Industry Two Years after the Sanctions
wilsoncenter.org
2024-06-11
One of the sectors targeted by U.S. economic sanctions is Russia's civil aviation. Shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Boeing and Airbus, whose planes constituted 70 percent of Russia's fleet, announced they would freeze the delivery of spare parts. Many predicted that Russia's commercial aviation would soon be grounded—a potentially devastating development for a country of almost seven million square miles and eleven time zones. Two years later, Russia's domestic aviation seems to have adjusted to the sanctions. How has that happened? What has been the cost of the adjustment, and what is the long-term outlook for the industry? Izabella Tabarovsky discusses the general impact of sanctions on the Russian economy with Dr. William Pomeranz, then delves into the story of the Russian aviation industry under sanctions with Dr. Steven Harris.
Putin beslagla 400 vestlige fly
TV2 (Norway)
2024-05-25
Flyene Putin beslagla er fortsatt på vingene, men uten tilgang på originaldeler. Forsøkene på å bygge egne fly går ikke så bra.
Sanctions Are Spoiling Russia’s Plans to Make Its Own Airplanes
The Russia File, Kennan Institute online
2024-04-09
Putin’s regime is feeling confident these days. Advances on the battlefield in Ukraine, expansions in armaments production, and the dithering of Republicans in the U.S. Congress show the war has turned in Russia’s favor. A well-orchestrated presidential election and some real public support buoy the regime. Political opponents are either dead, in prison, or in exile.
West Sanctions Russian Aviation, But Moscow Decides to Keep Planes Flying Despite Risks.
Russia Matters, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School online
2023-10-26
When the U.S. and its allies slapped sanctions on Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, severing aviation links was at the top of the list. Direct flights vanished and Russian airlines lost access to spare parts for their foreign airplanes. In retaliation, Vladimir Putin’s regime impounded foreign aircraft and shut off the world’s largest air space to countries imposing sanctions.
Au bon vieux temps des vols low cost soviétiques
Le Monde
2021-04-11
Jusqu’en 1991, beaucoup de Géorgiens partaient en virée à Moscou grâce aux dizaines de vols quotidiens Aeroflot à 37 roubles. L’URSS avait inventé un modèle qui deviendrait le symbole du capitalisme moderne.
Soviet housing was famously drab. This Ukraine complex is all about color
Los Angeles Times online
2019-05-12
Associate Professor of History and American Studies Steven Harris was quoted in the Los Angeles Times in an article about a new housing development in a residential area of Kiev, in Ukraine.
Wings of the Motherland: Soviet Aviation and Putin’s Russia with Steve Harris
The Source online
2016-04-11
The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 might have been expected to make Russia a liberal democracy; instead we see broad popular support for Putin’s undemocratic regime. Historian Steve Harris turns to aviation to offer new ways of understanding the Soviet past and Russia’s present.
Articles (7)
Aeroflot Routes to Baghdad: Soviet-Iraqi Relations during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1981)
Oxford: Oxford University PressSteven E. Harris, edited by Eileen Kane, Masha Kirasirova, and Margaret Litvin
2023 Establishes and maps the field of modern Russian-Arab history. Integrates the history of the Arab world, Russia, and the Caucasus, long distorted by linguistic and disciplinary divisions. Includes original archival and literary sources translated from six languages, many previously unpublished and all appearing in English for the first time
The World’s Largest Airline: How Aeroflot Learned to Stop Worrying and Became a Corporation
LaboratoriumSteven E. Harris
2021 Similar to sex, the Soviet Union did not have corporations. The famous utterance from the Gorbachev era about a sexless Soviet existence suggests how we might approach what happened to the corporation in Soviet history. Like explicit sex in Soviet culture, the workers’ state formally eradicated the dreaded incorporated bodies of capitalism and gave them no quarter in subsequent ideological battles.
Second World Urbanity: Infrastructures of Utopia and Really Existing Socialism
Journal of Urban HistoryDaria Bocharnikova and Steven E. Harris
2017 The disappearance of most state socialist regimes in 1989/1991 afforded scholars from a range of disciplines new opportunities to examine the history of socialist cities and their postsocialist transformations. Recent scholarship has focused particularly on such cities in their corresponding national contexts and with the passing of the Cold War, broader commonalities with the urban history of Western cities have come into sharper focus.
Soviet Mass Housing and the Communist Way of Life
Everyday Life in the Russian Past and PresentChoi Chatterjee, David L. Ransel, Mary Cavender, and Karen Petrone
2015 In these original essays on long-term patterns of everyday life in prerevolutionary, Soviet, and contemporary Russia, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized daily existence for Russians through the post-Soviet present.
"We Too Want To Live in Normal Apartments": Soviet Mass Housing and the Marginalization of the Elderly Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev
The Soviet and Post-Soviet ReviewSteven E. Harris
2005 In his short story, "The Exchange" (1969) the Soviet writer Yuri Trifonov explores a Muscovite family's struggle to leave the communal apartment they are forced to share with other families and move into a single-family, separate apartment of their own.
Everyday Life in the NEP, the Thaw, and the Communal Apartment
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian HistorySteven E. Harris
2005 In Search of "Ordinary" Russia.
Dawn of the Soviet Jet Age: Aeroflot Passengers and Aviation Culture under Khrushchev
cas.umw.eduSteven E. Harris
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 21, 3 (Summer 2020): 591-626.
