Wednesday, November 1

On Wednesday, November 1, we heard from Dr. Virginia Olmsted McGraw, Assistant Professor of Russian and East European History at the Naval Academy.  She spoke to us on Decolonization: Reflections on Ukrainian History.   It has been said that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it, so this presentation helped us put the current war in Ukraine in perspective.

Virginia Olmsted McGraw is an Assistant Professor of Russian and East European History at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. She was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.  She completed her BA in History and Russian Language and Literature in 2013 at the University of Virginia, and her MA and PhD in Russian and East European History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2020.  She has published an article “Proletarian in Content, National in (Uni)form,” which uses fashion as a lens for understanding the development of a collective Soviet identity after World War II, in Soviet and Post-Soviet Review.  A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Completion Fellowship, among others, have funded her research.  Her dissertation was the recipient of the 2021 Tucker/Cohen Dissertation Prize for an outstanding English-language doctoral dissertation in Soviet or post-Soviet politics and history.  She is currently revising her book manuscript for publication under the title Soviet by Design: Forming an International Fashion Industry during the Cold War.