Ethan Pollock is the Abbott Gleason University Professor of History at Brown University, where he has been chair of the Department of History since 2020. He received his B.A. in History from Tufts University in 1991 and his Ph.D. in Russian and Soviet history from UC Berkeley in 2000.
Ethan’s research and writing has been funded by numerous organizations, including Fulbright-Hays, IREX, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has been a fellow at George Washington University, Columbia University (Harriman Institute), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, and the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
Ethan’s 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. His second book, Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse (Oxford UP, 2019; in paperback, 2022), is the first English-language history of an institution at the heart of Russian identity. It appeared in Russian translation (Corpus) in 2021.
From 2003-2006 Ethan was a faculty member in the History Department at Syracuse University. He joined the Department of History at Brown in 2006. He currently teaches courses on Russian history, the history of the Cold War, and the history of the nuclear age.
