Matthias Neumann

Matthias Neumann is Professor of Modern History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. He has published extensively on the history of childhood and youth in revolutionary Russia, including the monograph The Communist Youth League and the Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1917–1932 (Routledge, 2011), which was translated into Spanish. He is also co-editor of Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide: Tradition, Rupture and Modernity (Routledge, 2017). His current research explores exchange programmes that enabled American children to visit the Soviet Union and investigates the role of children in citizen diplomacy during the Cold War. His forthcoming manuscript, American Peace Child: Bridging the Cold War Divide in a Soviet Youth Camp, is under contract with the University of Toronto Press. Professor Neumann is the President of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES). He was President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) from 2019-2023 and is the Head of School of the UEA School of History and Art History. He also serves as Trustee and Treasurer of the Royal Historical Society and is an Associate Editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

M.A.  Modern History, Social and Economic History, and Political Science; Dresden University of Technology, Germany (2004)

Ph.D. Modern History; University of East Anglia (2008)

• Professor Neumann is the Head of School.

Professor Neumann is particularly interested in the history of childhood and youth in the Soviet Union as well as cultural/citizen diplomacy during the Cold War. 

Professor Neumann is willing to supervise MA and research students interested in various aspects of the history of revolutionary Russia and the history of childhood and youth.

Supervision of PhD-projects to date:

• ‘Cult of the 'Urka': criminal subculture in the Gulag, 1924-53’
• ‘Becoming Soviet: Lost Cultural Alternatives in Ukraine, 1917-1933’
• ‘The Soviet Children’s Picture Book, 1917-1935’
• ‘Understanding and Treatment of Mental Illness in the Soviet Union after Stalin’
• 'Constructing identity : Kaliningrad and the appropriation of place'
• 'Educating the uneducable : deafblind education in the Soviet Union, 1925-1960'
• Crisis and decline : the radical right movement in the Russian Empire, 1900-1914'

Professor Neumann has been teaching and contributing to numerous modules in modern history at the School of History:

Level 4:    

• Introduction to Modern History
• Visual(ising) History
• The Holocaust in History
• Age of Extremes

Level 5:  

• Imperial Russian and Soviet History, 1861-1945
• From Stalin to Putin: The Long Shadow of the War
• The Cold War: A New History
• Propaganda

 Level 6:    

• Stalin and Stalinism: The USSR 1924-1953
• Youth in Modern Europe

 MA:                 

• Modernity in Russia