Teaching and Research Specialties
Russia, Eastern Europe, comparative European and American history of religious dissenters
Biography
Before joining the department of history in 2003, Dr. Zhuk taught a U.S. history in Russia and Ukraine for many years, and he published three books in Russian and more than twenty articles on colonial American history in English, French and Russian. After defending a new (now) American Ph. D. dissertation on Russian imperial history and joining a faculty at Ball State University, Dr. Zhuk’s research work concentrates on history of popular culture, religion and identity in Russia and Ukraine. Since 2003 Dr. Zhuk has published three scholarly books in English – 1) Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 (Baltimore, MD: the Johns Hopkins University & Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004); 2) small monograph Popular Culture, Identity and Soviet Youth in Dniepropetrovsk, 1959-1984 in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 1906, (Pittsburgh, PA: the University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); 3) Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985 (Baltimore, MD: the Johns Hopkins University Press & Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010). Recently, Dr. Zhuk started two new research projects:
"Symbolic Landscape of Modernity in Russian and Ukraine: Cultural Politics, School Textbooks, Media, Tourism, and Identity Contestation from the 1960s to the Present" and "Peoples' Diplomacy: The Insider Story of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies of the U.S. History, or Non-Official History of Russia-US Relations."
Vita