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About Amanda Jeanne Swain

Amanda Jeanne Swain is executive director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a PhD in Russian & East European European History from the University of Washington.

Amanda Jeanne Swain, PhD. Historian. Humanities Center executive director. Navigating academic systems with faculty and grad students.

Amanda Jeanne's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Amanda Jeanne:

Russian and Eurasian Studies June 24, 2021

Flowers Through Concrete

Explorations in Soviet Hippieland

Juliane Fürst

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland (Oxford University Press, 2021) is the first chronological history of Soviet hippies, tracing their beginnings in the 1960s through the movement’s maturity and ritualization in the 1970s …
Education June 16, 2021

Putting the Humanities PhD to Work

Thriving in and Beyond the Classroom

Katina L. Rogers

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and Beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020), Katina L. Rogers tackles three major issues in academia – post-PhD careers, academic …
Education May 12, 2021

The New PhD

How to Build a Better Graduate Education

Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
Whether and how to reform, indeed to transform graduate education has been a matter for debate, discussion and experimentation over the past 30 years – at least. In The New …
Russian and Eurasian Studies March 9, 2018

Between Truth and Time

A History of Soviet Central Television

Christine E. Evans

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television (Yale University Press, 2016), Christine E. Evans reveals that Soviet television in the Brezhnev era was anything but boring …
Eastern European Studies October 31, 2017

Whose Bosnia?

Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840-1914

Edin Hajdarpasic

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav movements. At the same time, they all felt frustration with …
Eastern European Studies August 19, 2017

The People's Own Landscape

Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany

Scott Moranda

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be …
Russian and Eurasian Studies August 13, 2017

American Girls in Red Russia

Chasing the American Dream

Julia Mickenberg

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the American Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Julia Mickenberg tells the story of women both famous and unknown, committed radicals and adventure …
Eastern European Studies July 25, 2017

Hip Hop Ukraine

Music, Race, and African Migration

Adriana Helbig

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In 2004, during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Adriana Helbig saw African musicians rapping in Ukrainian and wearing embroidered Ukrainian ethnic costumes. Her curiosity about how these musicians came to …
Eastern European Studies July 8, 2017

Designing Tito's Capital

Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism

Brigitte Le Normand

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
NB: An earlier version of this podcast has been replaced with a new file in which the the technical problems of the first were corrected. -NBn, 7/11/17 At the end …
Eastern European Studies May 2, 2017

Bearslayers

The Rise and Fall of the Latvian National Communists

William Prigge

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In 1959, approximately 2,000 members of the the Latvian Communist Party were purged for "nationalist tendencies." However, the causes of their rise and their fall reached all the way to …
Russian and Eurasian Studies March 25, 2017

The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia

Transformation in Buryatia

Melissa Chakars

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia (Central European University Press, 2014), Melissa Chakars reveals not only how Soviet policies disrupted traditional Buryat ways of life …
Russian and Eurasian Studies January 4, 2017

The High Title of a Communist

Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime

Edward Cohn

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
Edward Cohn analyzes changes in Communist Party discipline in the Soviet Union from the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939 through the 1960s in The High Title of a Communist: Postwar …
Eastern European Studies January 4, 2017

The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania

Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War

Violeta Davoliute

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge, Violeta Davoliute calls Lithuania an improbably successful and paradoxically representative case …
Eastern European Studies September 30, 2016

The Red Rockets' Glare

Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957

Asif A. Siddiqi

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Asif Siddiqi approaches the history of the Soviet space program as a combination of engineering …
Eastern European Studies September 12, 2016

After the Revolution

Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia

Jessica Greenberg

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
Jessica Greenberg's After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (Stanford University Press, 2014) explores a dual tension at work in Serbia in the early 2000s …
Russian and Eurasian Studies August 18, 2016

States of Obligation

Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic

Yanni Kotsonis

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
I have to admit that I was quite intimidated by a book on taxation in imperial Russia. But States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early …
Eastern European Studies June 19, 2016

Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna?

The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe

Ana Foteva

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
Starting with Metternich's declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th …
Eastern European Studies May 23, 2016

The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-1931

Per Anders Rudling

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
I don't often have a chance to read books that focus solely on Belarus, which is exactly why I was intrigued by The Rise and Fall of Belarusian Nationalism, 1906-193 …
Russian and Eurasian Studies May 23, 2016

Sex, Politics &amp

Political Legitimacy in Russia

Valerie Sperling

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
The prevalence of media that reinforces a traditional masculine image of Vladimir Putin, Russia's leader, is at the core of Valerie Sperling's analysis of gender norms and sexualization as a …
Eastern European Studies March 25, 2016

The People's Game

Football, State and Society in East Germany

Alan McDougall

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In The People's Game: Football, State and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Alan McDougall looks at football from the top-down and bottom-up: as a tool of the state, as forming …
Eastern European Studies March 7, 2016

Written Here, Published There

How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain

Friederike Kind-Kovacs

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (Central European University Press, 2014) is a richly detailed description of the social practices, debates and discourses that were …
Eastern European Studies December 18, 2015

The Power of Song

Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution

Guntis Smidchens

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In the late 1980s, the Baltic Soviet Social Republics seemed to explode into song as Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian national movements challenged Soviet rule. The leaders of each of these …
Eastern European Studies November 3, 2015

Holy Legionary Youth

Roland Clark

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Cornell University Press, 2015) is an in-depth study of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, one of the largest and longest lasting …
Eastern European Studies October 9, 2015

Kith, Kin and Neighbors

Communities and Confessions in 17th Century Wilno

David Frick

Hosted by Amanda Jeanne Swain
In 1636, King Wladyslaw IV's quartermaster surveyed the houses of Wilno in advance of the king's visit to the city. In Kith, Kin and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century …