Biography

Biography: James Heinzen specializes in the history of modern Russia. His research interests include the social, political, and cultural history of the Soviet Union, Stalinism, crime and corruption in Soviet history, everyday life, and revolution. Heinzen is the author of two books and numerous scholarly articles in journals such as the Journal of Social History, Slavic Review, and Kritika. He has written on topics such as anticorruption campaigns, secret informant networks under Stalin, bribery as a cultural practice, attacks on “bourgeois specialists” in the 1920s, and the politics of Soviet identity after the Revolution. Heinzen received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and his B.A. from Trinity College (Hartford, CT). Before he came to Rowan, he taught at Princeton University and Yale University.

Courses Taught: Professor Heinzen teaches courses devoted to modern Russian and Soviet history, the Cold War, historical methods, the Holocaust, Western Civilization, and modern European history.

Research: James Heinzen is the author of The Art of the Bribe: Corruption under Stalin, 1943-1953(Yale University Press, 2016). This study of corruption in everyday life during postwar Stalinism—and the  regime’s problematic attempts to wipe it out—is based on research in recently opened Communist Party and Soviet state archives located in Russia. Financial support for this research was provided by a number of foundations and organizations, including the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), the Archives and Library of the Hoover Institution for War and Peace at Stanford University, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Open Society Archive (Budapest). His first book was Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917-1929 (2004).

Dr. Heinzen is currently working on a social history of "underground entrepreneurs" and black markets in the Soviet 1950s-1980s. This project is based on contemporary interviews and declassified archival material, some of which was produced during major trials and criminal investigations. In 2019, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) awarded Dr. Heinzen a National Fellowship to support research leave for the 2019-2020 academic year. In 2018, Dr. Heinzen won a Summer Stipend grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in support of the new project. He was a visiting scholar in Paris at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (The School for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences) in March 2016.

You can visit Dr. Heinzen’s Academia.edu research page, which includes links to some of his scholarly articles.