Research Interests

Jonathan Brunstedt’s research centers on nationalism and cultural memory in the Soviet Union and wider world, with a particular emphasis on the representation and commemoration of war. He is the author of The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Based on research in Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian, North American, and British archives, the book examines official notions of patriotism and patriotic identity in the USSR through the lens of Second World War remembrance. Among other things, it shows how a socialist society, ostensibly committed to Marxist ideals of internationalism and global class struggle, reconciled itself to the seemingly un-Marxist notions of patriotism, homeland, and the glorification of victory in war.

His next book, Echoes of Another War, will look at the use of historical analogies and their role in framing unfolding conflicts and in redefining political identities. The book surveys the entangled cultural legacies of the Vietnam and Soviet-Afghan wars, focusing on the development and impact of a transnational “Soviet-Vietnam” narrative throughout the 1980s. This analogizing, Brunstedt contends, played a role both in hastening the USSR’s demise and in fueling the revival of an American exceptionalism that outlived the Cold War.

Brunstedt’s research has appeared in Ab Imperio, Nationalities Papers, and the Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, as well as in such volumes as The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge) and Excavating Memory: Material Culture Approaches to Sites of Remembering and Forgetting (Univ. Press of Florida). He has received fellowships and grants from, among other places, the NEH, the Woodrow Wilson Center Kennan Institute, the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki, and IREX. Previously, Brunstedt was an assistant professor of Modern European History at Utah State University. He completed his Ph.D. in Modern History and M.Phil., with distinction, at the University of Oxford.

“You can read more about Jonathan Brunstedt’s ongoing research in a recent interview:  https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/drawing-lessons-soviet-afghan-war-conversation-title-viii-research-scholar-jonathan?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=wilson

Publications

The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge University Press, 2021)