Department of History

Ethan Pollock was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After receiving a B.A. from Tufts University in 1991, he moved to Moscow, Russia, where he taught US history and was the associate producer of a documentary film on the Soviet atomic bomb project. He received his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history from UC Berkeley in 2000.

Ethan's new book, Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse (Oxford UP, 2019), is the first English-language history of an institution at the heart of Russian identity. His first book, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton UP, 2006; in paperback, 2008), examines Soviet politics, science, and ideology during the last years of Joseph Stalin's life and the first years of the Cold War.

Ethan's research and writing has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, IREX, SSRC, ACLS, and NCEEER. He has been a fellow at George Washington University, Columbia University (Harriman Institute), Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, and the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Ethan was a faculty member in the History Department at Syracuse University for 2003-2006. He joined the Department of History at Brown in 2006. He currently teaches a course on Russian history, the history of the Cold War, and the history of the nuclear age.