This month we highlight the research of Fellows from the class of 2023–24 whose projects consider the pursuit of justice, both criminal and social, in a variety of contexts and through diverse means—governmental investigations, courts, artistic protest, and the development of communities united by shared experiences of discrimination.
Oleg Budnitskii
HSE University
Sally E. Hadden
Western Michigan University
Abigail Susik
Willamette University
E.K. Tan
Stony Brook University
Oleg Budnitskii
Project: “The Red Army is Not Ideal”: Soviet Soldiers’ Violence Against Civilians, 1939–1947
Oleg Budnitskii is professor of history and director of the Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the National Research University–Higher School of Economics (HSE University) in Moscow. He is the author or coauthor of nine books, and editor or coeditor of 27 other books, mostly on the various aspects of Russian, Soviet, and Jewish history. At the National Humanities Center, Budnitskii is completing a new book project, entitled “The Red Army is Not Ideal”: Soviet Soldiers’ Violence Against Civilians, 1939–1947.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
As is often the case with historians, the impetus for this project came from an archival find: the minutes of the secret Judicial Affairs Commission of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They contained information about war criminality, including Red Army violence against civilians both abroad and at home. The Red Army, paradoxically, was defender, liberator, and threat to civilians. The book addresses the following questions: What were the origins, extent, and nature of the violence against civilians? Who committed the violence? I am interested not only in what Red Army soldiers did, but what they were like. Finally, how does the behavior of Soviet soldiers during World War II fit into the traditions of the Russian imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian armies?
In the course of your research, have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
It is difficult to surprise a historian who has been studying the history of Soviet wartime justice for more than 10 years. According to official data, during the war about one million servicemen were convicted by military tribunals, including about 135,000 who were sentenced to execution. However, many of the crimes which are documented in the materials I have studied are nonetheless striking both for their brutality and their spontaneity. And most of the crimes were committed by people with no criminal record.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I hope that my book will broaden our understanding of the Red Army and Soviet society in the World War II period. In addition to its scholarly interventions, my book will challenge pervasive romanticized sacrosanct approaches to the history of WWII, which are currently promoted by the Russian government and its propagandists. Even just wars, like the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany, contain blood and dirt alongside heroism and self-sacrifice. If the true nature of the war was better understood in Russia, perhaps we wouldn’t be witnessing the seemingly unthinkable war against Ukraine.
Sally E. Hadden
Project: One Supreme Court
Sally E. Hadden is a legal historian of early America and the antebellum United States. She received her history doctorate and law degree from Harvard University. Her book, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, describes the white-on-black violence that pervaded America’s slave societies (2001). She also coedited the Blackwell Companion to American Legal History (2013) and Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History (with Patricia Minter, 2013). Hadden is currently writing a study of the first Supreme Court and its English, colonial, and Revolutionary forebears with Maeva Marcus. She is also completing a study entitled “Cities of Lawyers: Legal Professionals in Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston” that examines the working lives of attorneys in three eighteenth-century seaports. As part of the Ames Foundation, she leads a project to digitize and annotate the records created by the eighteenth-century Massachusetts’s Superior Court of Judicature.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
There’s always been a disconnect between the legal history of early America (preceding the American Revolution) and legal history of the early national period—it’s as if people studying courts, judges, lawyers, and justice assume that 1775 or 1787 are the only beginning points they need to know. Of course, this downplays the experiences people had as part of the British Empire, their notions of justice as it began to evolve in distinctive ways in various parts of North America, and the running disputes between officials and people that flourished in the 1760s and 70s. This book begins by exploring those earlier years and reveals they had a formative impact on how the judiciary developed, during and after the Revolution.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I was surprised to learn that the state of Georgia did not have a supreme court until the 1840s! We presume that states “must have had” a high court of justice, as the national government did after 1787, but in fact there was considerable variation in how justice was delivered in the colonial era as well as after the Revolution.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
After writing this book, I want other legal historians to realize how much is still “out there” waiting to be discovered and analyzed about law and justice before 1775. We need more studies of equity, admiralty, far more detailed work done on dower and trusts for women who married, arbitration and informal methods of settling disputes, in addition to studies of judges who rode circuit before the US Supreme Court did so. We need reliable studies of justice being delivered at the colonial appeals level for every colony; that was the point at which governors and their councilors as well as legislatures (that sat as courts too) were involved.
Abigail Susik
Project: Afrosurrealism and Anti-racism
Abigail Susik explores the intersection of international surrealism with anti-authoritarian protest cultures in her wide-ranging research on modern and contemporary art history and visual culture from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries. Focusing on European, North American, and Latin American cultural contexts, her work places emphasis on social art history and labor theory methodologies, gender and sexuality perspectives, and material culture histories. Susik is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (2021), editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967 (2023), and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (2022). She is coeditor of two forthcoming volumes: Bugs Bunny and the Blues: Selected Writings on Surrealism and Popular Culture, 1965–2008 (2024; coedited with Paul Buhle) and Enquiry on Magic Art by André Breton (2024). Her edited collection The Art of Animation and International Surrealism, 1920–Present is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press in May 2025.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
Two topics led me to this project. The first was discovering the work of surrealist poet, performer, and activist Jayne Cortez (1934–2012), such as her 1969 volume of poetry Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares and the 1982 album by Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters, There It Is. I became interested in understanding how Cortez’s practice related to the larger phenomenon of Afrosurrealism. The second was my introduction to the to surrealist special issues of the journal Race Traitor, edited by John Garvey and Noel Ignatiev. The Chicago surrealists guest-edited two special issues of Race Traitor in 1998 and 2001, arguing that the abolition of whiteness was a liberatory struggle that could be augmented by surrealist practices of revolutionary post-racist imagining.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
In general, I am surprised by the lack of existing scholarship devoted to Jayne Cortez and Race Traitor in the field of surrealism studies.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
My aim is to articulate and amplify anti-racist initiatives in the history of international surrealism and para-surrealisms.
E.K. Tan
Project: Queer Homecoming: Translocal Remapping of Sinophone Kinship
E.K. Tan is associate professor of comparative literature and Sinophone studies in the Department of English and the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. He specializes in modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Sinophone studies, queer Asia, global Asias, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, and the intersection of Anglophone and Sinophone literature and culture from Southeast Asia. He is the author of Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the Nanyang Literary World (Cambria Press, 2017). He is currently working on two separate projects, titled Queer Homecoming: Translocal Remapping of Sinophone Kinship and Mandarinization and its Impact on Sinophone Cultural Production.
What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?
My journey with this project began in 2010 when I received an invitation to contribute to an edited volume on queer Sinophone cultures. As the essay evolves into this project, I want to work on something personal and meaningful not just for myself but for those who have fought for LGBQT rights in Sinophone societies in Asia. I find activist groups in Sinophone communities inspiring in the way they navigate creative means to negotiate for LGBTQ rights. I am interested in the role media plays in exploring a new type of kinship that is more inclusive than traditional ones for queer subjects and their families. I often regret not having the luxury to join the activist efforts in person being an ocean away. Hence, this project is my small effort to celebrate their accomplishments in advancing basic rights of disenfranchised communities.
In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?
I have presented parts of this project to audiences in Asia in the past few years. I was genuinely surprised and touched by the overwhelming interest in my topic by students at the National University of Singapore and NYU–Shanghai. Growing up in Asia, I often find myself and my peers lacking in social awareness. Now that I have accumulated an understanding and a set of vocabulary on social justice, I was hoping to use my privilege and power as an educator to share my knowledge. In both encounters, I was left with so many thought-provoking questions at the Q&A from the young minds who attended my lectures. I was truly inspired and motivated by them and their enthusiasm. They are the future; they are the hope.
What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?
I hope this project contributes to many more conversations among scholars of queer Asia. A gap in scholarship exchange between scholars situated in Asia and those of us in North America and Europe continues to exist. There is still so much we can learn from each other. As scholars in Euro-American institutions, I hope we can bring to light the important scholarship by academics in and from Asia. Their scholarship is crucial in guiding us to contribute to the knowledge production of queer Asia for Asia. The effort to debunk the myth of the global north as the producer of theory versus the global South as the receiver of theory and bearer of experience is an ongoing and necessary one. As a Sinophone studies scholar, I hope my work encourages others to take on projects that reject the old mode of area studies grounded in cold war ideologies.