Idaho Society of Fellows | Post-doc Opportunities at the University of Idaho

Housed in the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences, the Society constitutes a new initiative to broaden the sphere of interdisciplinary and collaborative research in the humanities and social sciences.

Each year, the Society will recruit three postdoctoral fellows for two-year appointments. The fellows will teach two general education courses per year and will otherwise engage in their research and participate in the academic life of the college. These postdoctoral fellowships will provide professional support and development and work closely with faculty mentors and graduate students and will engage in interdisciplinary initiatives across the campus.

The fellowships are generously funded by CLASS endowments and a partnership with the Office of Research and Economic Development. Candidates are drawn from the following fields:

• Political science
• History
• Anthropology
• International/global studies.

Annual Speaker Series

Soviet-American Scientific Connections

• Time
  •  2:30 - 4:30 p.m., PT
• Date
  • Wednesday, May 1, 2024
• Location
  • Zoom

Registration link: https://uidaho.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RrqW23gVT62QqNiP1z9uUA

The Soviet Union and the United States are often said to have organized and done science quite differently from one another. In the aftermath of the October Revolution, some Soviet scientists began to position their science system as something fundamentally different from those of the “bourgeois”, “Western” countries. During the Cold War, Soviet and American science were often seen as being in conflict with one another, and both states placed a high value on scientific research. In spite of this, many Soviet and American scientists developed and maintained longstanding ties with one another, acting through correspondence, formal exchange programs, travel, and other means.

This panel aims to develop new perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and American scientists by highlighting the different types of connections that existed between them across the twentieth century. The presentations will consider various forms of contact, collaboration, and exchange, all of which constituted an important form of track-two scientific diplomacy. Specific topics that will be addressed include long-term individual contacts among scientists and the means through which they were maintained, a comparison of a Soviet scientist who moved to the US and an American who left for the Soviet Union, and debates and exchanges among Soviet and American encyclopedists over the future development of science, technology, and world culture.

Speaker: Paul Rubinson

Topic: The Pursuit of Scientific Justice: Soviet and American Scientist Exiles in the 1930s

During the 1920s, the prominent American geneticist H.J. Muller blasted the racism and elitism of eugenics from a scientific perspective. When the Great Depression upended American society, Muller extended his leftist critique of eugenics to include American science and society in general as complicit in the vicissitudes of capitalism and found himself drawn to socialism’s embrace of a scientific approach to social justice. In particular, the Soviet Union promised to mobilize science to create change on behalf of the working class and the socialist revolution. Muller exiled himself to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, where he espoused a socially-just version of eugenics, but soon found himself on the wrong side of ideological debates about Marxist science. At almost the same moment, the Russian military chemist Vladimir Ipatieff, once an artillery officer in the Tsarist army, struggled to remain loyal to his country as the Bolshevik government shifted the standards of science and changed the role of scientists to conform more directly with communist ideology. Fearing arrest, Ipatieff ultimately fled the Soviet Union and found asylum in the United States, where he was, in his mind, justly rewarded for his scientific work. A comparison of these two scientists, one born in the United States and one an adopted son, demonstrates the variety of scientific approaches to social justice in the first half of the twentieth century.

Bio: Paul Rubinson is Professor of History at Bridgewater State University. He was born in Baltimore, MD, and graduated with a BA from Vanderbilt University. He served as a Smith-Richardson predoctoral fellow at Yale University International Security Studies in 2007 and received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. His current research interests focus on the relationship between scientists and the development of human rights from the 1790s to the 1970s. He is the author of Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State, and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America, published in 2016 by the University of Massachusetts Press, as well as Rethinking the Antinuclear Movement, published in 2017 by Routledge. His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History and Cold War History as well as edited collections on the Cold War, science, and human rights from Routledge, Manchester University Press, and Oxford University Press. 

Speaker: Anna Doel

Topic: “Very Sincerely Yours”: Informal Contacts in the Scientific Cold War

This is a story of scientists who met in the throes of the Cold War, started working together and became lifelong friends. There would be nothing special about it, except those scientists came from two nations that made it the hardest to be friendly at the time—the United States and the Soviet Union. Often referred to as “track-two diplomacy,” the intergovernmental program of scientific exchanges and cooperation was a show of good will and an attempt to relieve political pressures through intellectual activities that, ostensibly, had nothing to do with politics, just like the famous Bolshoi Theater tours of the U.S. or the book exchange between academic libraries. In the Cold War, very little at the intergovernmental level had nothing to do with politics, let alone pursuing conflicting national interests and ideologies and guarding state secrets. 

Parallel to scripted official visits and despite seemingly endless restrictions, this science diplomacy program had another side to it, that of human connections. From exchanging Christmas cards and sharing journal articles and specimens to organizing rescue missions, American and Soviet scientists continued to keep in touch (some—for over 40 years). So, what would prompt close personal contacts? How were they maintained and what was their significance for participants, for research, and for the Cold War? What does this knowledge add to our understanding of twentieth-century history of science? Each story of contact and collaboration brings something different to the discussion. Using case studies of long-term individual contacts, this paper will show the diversity of such communications and some patterns that defined their productivity.

Bio: Anna Doel is a historian of Cold War science. She holds a doctorate from the University of Minnesota’s HSTM program and is now working on her first book discussing relationships between American and Soviet intellectual communities. 

Speaker: Michael Coates

Topic: Knowledge for a Technological Future: Exchanges and Debates among Soviet and American Encyclopedists in the Cold War

The French philosopher Denis Diderot argued that the encyclopedist needs to anticipate the trajectory of his nation’s history so that his work could help to shape it (and so that his work would not be immediately rendered obsolete by changing circumstances).  In both the Soviet Union and the United States, encyclopedists acted on a similar idea.  Seeing the widespread scientific and technological changes that were taking place during the Cold War era, the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia tried to predict where the world was headed in the next several decades.  They aimed to develop encyclopedias that would prepare their readers for that future world, helping to shape it.  Much of this was done in dialogue with one another.  Britannica held a series of conferences dedicated to this question that drew in prominent scientists, historians, sociologists of science, and science fiction writers.  Soviet scholars participated in these discussions, often taking positions that, while quite different from those of their American and Western European counterparts, were nevertheless respected.  At the same time, figures affiliated with Britannica regularly traveled to the Soviet Union, discussing methodological questions and debating both US-Soviet relations and humanity’s scientific future.  Both sides also considered the prospects for creating something like a “world encyclopedia” that could synthesize the worldviews of all cultures; this work was sometimes done in collaboration with UNESCO, where both publishers had extensive ties.

On one level, these connections might be surprising: both the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and Britannica were politically connected publications, often being used by their respective governments as tools for projecting soft power in opposition to one another.  But both sides were committed to the idea that knowledge exchanges could contribute to mutual understanding.  The talk will consider the questions of how different the worldviews exemplified by the two encyclopedias were, whether they were moving closer together or further apart amid rapid technological change and the Cold War’s ideological conflict, and what the prospects for a common or synthetic epistemic framework between the two sides really were.

Bio: Michael Coates is a Postdoctoral Fellow in East European Studies with the Martin Institute and the Idaho Society of Fellows. Coates is a specialist in Soviet and Russian history, with a particular focus on the history of Soviet science and technology, intellectual history, and the history of knowledge. He is currently working on a book manuscript about the history of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia aimed to reconstruct all of human knowledge in accordance with the principles of the Marxist philosophies of dialectical and historical materialism, becoming one of the most authoritative sources of knowledge in the Soviet Union. As a part of this and other projects (including one on the Encyclopædia Britannica during the Cold War), Coates has conducted extensive archival research in Russia and the United States.