Dr Robert Dale
Supported by the University of Glasgow Library
Robert Dale is Senior Lecturer in Russian History in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University, where he has been based since 2015. His research interests centre upon how Soviet society dealt with the aftermath of extreme and traumatic events. Much of his previous work has examined the aftermath of the Second World War in Soviet Russia, focusing on issues of demobilisation, post-war urban reconstruction, and traumatic memories of the conflict. Robert was awarded a PhD in History from Queen Mary, University of London in 2011 for research exploring the demobilization and post-war readjustment of Red Army veterans in Leningrad after 1945. A revised and expanded version of this work was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2015 as Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad: Soldiers to Civilians. He held teaching fellowships at Newcastle University and the University of York before receiving a British Academy, Postdoctoral Fellowship held at King’s College London and then Nottingham Trent University between 2012 and 2015. His current work builds on his interests in urban history, aftermaths, and trauma, to write the history of the Leningrad flood of September 1924, exploring how early Bolshevik society responded to natural disaster in general, and specifically this remarkable flood. The research will form part of a book length project to write an urban environmental history of flooding which takes the Leningrad flood of September 1924 as its point of departure.
I am delighted to be able to work with Glasgow University Library’s impressive Slavonic collections thanks to the support of a Visiting Research Fellowship. It will allow me to work with two main bodies of source material. First, early Soviet newspapers, exploring both local and national reports of the flood itself, flood relief measures, and the response of central and local government; and second a number of published institutional history of Leningrad factories, illustrating how employers and local communities dealt with the destruction, disruption, and displacement caused by flooding. Such materials will add substantially to the book I am writing on the urban environmental history of the Leningrad flood.
