Research
Zoo Studies: A New Humanities
Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule
Other Voices in Soviet History
Riazanskaia derevnia v 1929-1930 gg Khronika golovokruzheniia: Dokumenty i materialy.
Books
Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (McGill Queens University Press, 2019) – Co-edited with Daniel Vandersommers – Selected by the American Library Association scholarly review journal Choice as an 2020 Outstanding Academic Book.
Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside Under Soviet Rule (University of Toronto Press, 2011) – Winner in 2012 of the Reginald Zelnik book prize in history for my book for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the field of history in the previous calendar year.
Other Voices in Soviet History (McGill Queens University Press, 2025) – Co-edited with Dan Healey and Heather DeHaan
Riazanskaia derevnia v 1929-1930 gg Khronika golovokruzheniia: Dokumenty i materialy. With Lynne Viola, Sergei Vladimirovich Zhuravlev, and Andrei Nikolaevich Mel'nik eds. Rosspenn: Moskva, 1998. xliv + 703 pp. Maps, notes.
Contributions to Books
- "Introduction: Lynne Viola and the Search for Soviet Voices" co-written with Dan Healey and Heather DeHaan, in Other Voices in Soviet History Dan Healey, Heather DeHaan, and Tracy McDonald eds. (McGill Queens University Press, 2025): 3-17.
- "Saving Beauty: The Leningrad Zoo during the Siege of World War II," in Other Voices in Soviet History Dan Healey, Heather DeHaan, and Tracy McDonald eds. (McGill Queens University Press, 2025): 93-112.
- "Prospects for Transformation in the Early 1920's" in Daniel Orlovsky (ed.) A Companion to the Russian Revolution. Wiley Blackwell Companion to World History Series, 2020
- "Introduction," co-written with Daniel Vandersommers Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (McGill Queens University Press, 2019)
- "Sculpting Dinah with the Blunt Tools of the Historian," in Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (McGill Queens University Press, 2019)
- "A Peasant Rebellion in Stalin's Russia," Journal of Social History, (Fall, 2001): 125-146 reprinted in Lynne Viola (ed.), Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s. Cornell University Press, 2001: 84-108.
- "Riazanskaia derevnia," in Lynne Viola, Sergei Zhuravlev, Andrei Mel'nik, Tracy McDonald (eds.), Riazanskaia derevnia v 1929-1930 gg.: khronika golovokruzheniia, Moscow, Rosspen, 1998: xxii-xxxii.
- "Otvet Riazanskogo krest'ianstva na nachalo kollektivizatsii," (Response of the Riazan peasantry to the onset of collectivization) A.A. Sevestianova et. al. (eds.), Regional'naia istoriia v Rossiiskoi i zarubezhnoi istoriografii (Regional history in Russian and foreign historiography) Riazan', 1999: 42-47.
Journal Articles
- "The Violence of Collectivization and its Legacy," Europe-Asia Studies 65 9 (November 2013)
- "History, Villagers, and the Social Scientists: Wrestling with the Past in the Present," International Labor and Working Class History 81 (July 2012): 149-162
- "Pitelino Redux," idea&s: the arts & science review vol. 4, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 38-41
- "Soviet Bandit Tales: "The steam of the still and the lure of easy profit."" Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 35, No. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 2001): 219-243.
- "A Peasant Rebellion in Stalin's Russia," Journal of Social History, (Fall, 2001): 125-146
Presentations
2025 – Yorkminster Park Speaker Series
2023 – "Being Tit Mal'kovich: Being Otter," at Crossing Boundaries. Human-Animal Relations from Post-Petrine Russia to the Soviet State (1725–1991)" Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe [GWZO] Leipzig) – 29 June 2023.
2019 – "Guerrilla Love: Or How to Love a Gorilla." Love is Revolting conference at the School of Advanced Studies in Tiumen, Western Siberia. 17 May 2019
2019 – Roundtable: Modernist Empathies: Art and Nonhuman Animals "A young gorilla meets the modernist Djuna Barnes" Beastly Modernisms Conference, University of Glasgow. 12 September 2019.
2019 - "Animals look back: Artistic representation and a real existing animal." – Posthuman Alterities Conference, Wilfred Laurier 3 March 2019
2018 - "Touched by God in the USSR: A Photographer Plays the Fool and Makes History." ASEEES 8 December 2018, Boston.
2018 - Can we "produce the concept of something we cannot imagine"? 16 November 2018 SLSA Toronto, Ontario
2018 – "Animal Biography," Brock University, "Thinking About Animals Conference," 1 and 2 March 2018
2017 – invited by Animals in the Law and Humanities to talk on Animal History, 21 March 2017
2016 – "Sculpting Dinah with the blunt tools of the historian," Zoo Studies: A New Humanities, Workshop 1-2 December.
2015 – invited by Stetson University to conduct an undergraduate seminar, give a talk to faculty and students, and show the film The Photographer. 24 February to 01 March
2014 – invited by The Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia (CREECA) University of Wisconsin, Madison to talk on Soviet Zoos. 9 October 2014
2014 – invited by the Department of History, Higher School of Economics, Moscow to talk on Soviet Zoos. 29 May 2014 (http://www.hse.ru/en/news/edu/125555678.html)
2014 – invited by Dalhousie Russian Studies and Department of History to talk on Soviet zoos. 28 March 2014
2013 – invited by the Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the University of Toronto to talk on Soviet Zoos.
2013 – invited by the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU colloquium "Socialist Animals." The official commentators on my 8 2013 talk were the head of Animal Studies at NYU, Dale Jamieson, and environmental historian Karl Appuhn
2010 - "Historical Layers: From the archives to the first perestroika novel to the documentary." York Historian's Craft Workshop. 02 December 2010
2010 - "On Violence," Villains and Victims Conference, Nottingham, 6-7 April, 2010
2006 - "Who's afraid of Joseph Stalin?" Workshop: What was Soviet about Soviet Real Socialism? April 2006 University of Toronto
2018 Animals Experience the Moscow Zoo from the 1920s to the 1950s. Department of History, McMaster University 25 October 2018
2009 Screening of The Photographer, McMaster Department of History Speaker Series
2007 Erin Community Outreach – Screened "The Province of Lost Film"
2006 U of T Graduate Symposium, "Telling Stories: History, Medium and Message," February 10/11 to show "The Province of Lost Film"
2003 "Peasants, State, and High Modernism." Workshop: What was Soviet Real Socialism? April 4/5 2003 University of Toronto
Community Engagement and Knowledge Exchange
2020 – Curator of the exhibition Animals Across Discipline Time & Space, 4 January – 21 March, McMaster Museum of Art
Awards and Recognition
• SSHRC Insight Grant – $169,987 (2014)
• Messecar Professor, Department of History (2014-2015)
• Research Time Stipend Award, Faculty of Humanities, McMaster (2015)
• Reginald Zelnik Book Prize for Face to the Village (2012)
• McMaster Incentive Grant – $5,000 (2013)
Professional Activities
I am a founding collective member of the Canadian Association for Critical Animal Studies (CACAS) and participate in the McMaster University Animal Studies Reading Group and the University of Toronto Animals and the Law Working Group.
I serve as a journal referee for numerous academic publications including Slavic Review, Kritika, Russian Review, Canadian Journal of History, and others. I also review manuscripts for Cornell University Press, MIT Press, Penn State University Press, Oxford University Press, and University of Toronto Press.