Department of History

Alissa Klots

  • Assistant Professor

Fields:

Russian and Soviet History
Gender History
History of Aging

 

Teaching:

Stalin
Soviet History
Sex and Gender: A Global History of the Modern World

Education & Training

  • PhD, Rutgers University, 2017

Representative Publications

"Just Like Any Other Worker? Class and Gender in the Regulation of Domestic Service in the Early Soviet Period," Journal of Social History, 56:1 (2022):114-143.

"'Tak vy istoria?': sovetskii chekovek na fone tikhoi arkhivnoi revolustii pozdnego sotsializma," [So You are Living History? Soviet Person and the Quiet Archival Revolution of Late Socialism] Antropologicheskii Forum/Forum for Anthropology and Culture 50 (2021): 131-161. Co-authored with Maria Romashova.

"Young Minds – Young Bodies: The Emotional and the Physical in the Late Soviet Discourse on Aging,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 48:2 (2021): 189-210. Co-authored with Maria Romashova

"Lenin’s Cohort: The First Mass Generation of Soviet Pensioners and Public Activism of the Khrushchev’s Era,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 20:3 (2018): 573-597. Co-authored with Maria Romashova

'The Kitchen Maid as Revolutionary Symbol:  Paid Domestic Labour and the Emancipation of Soviet Women, 1917-1941' in The Palgrave Handbook on Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union. Ed. Melanie Ilic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 83-100.

"Svetlyi put’: Institut domashnei prislugi kak migratsionnyi kanal i mechanism sotsial’noi mobil’nosti epokhi stalinizma,” [The Radiant Path: Domestic Service as a Migration Channel and Social Mobility Mechanism of the Stalinist Epoch] Novoie Literaturnoie Obozreniie 117:5 (2012): 40-52

Research Interests

My first book, Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women's Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor (Cambridge University Press, 2024, forthcoming), examines the paradoxes of domestic service in a society that saw the emancipation of women from housework as one of its main goals and central achievements. Gender and aging under socialism are the focus of my next research project, which I am pursuing in collaboration with Maria Romashova at Perm State University (Russia). We explore the meanings of old age and retirement for the first generation of builders of communism and their role in the development of late socialism.