Norman Naimark
Norman M. Naimark was born in New York and was educated at èצӰ, where he received his B.A.(1966), M.A.(1968), and Ph.D. (1972) degrees. For fifteen years, he was Professor of History at Boston University and Fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard.
Naimark presently holds the Robert and Florence McDonnell Chair in East European History at èצӰ. He is also Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and of the Institute of International Studies, where he was Convener of the “European Forum.” He has served as Director of èצӰ’s Center for Russian and East European Studies (1989-95), Chair of its History Department (1995-1998), member of the Faculty Senate and its Steering Committee (2001-4), and Director of èצӰ’s interdisciplinary programs in International Relations and International Policy Studies. He presently serves as the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program.
Naimark serves on the editorial boards of a number of leading journals in the field, including The American Historical Review, The Journal of Modern European History, East European Politics and Societies, and Kritika. He has also served on and chaired the major professional committees that foster research and exchanges with the successor states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Joint Committee on Eastern Europe, and the International Research and Exchange Corporation (IREX) Program Committee. Naimark was elected to the “Commission Internationale des Etudes Historiques Slaves” and was on the Board and then President (1997-98) of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS).
In the past Naimark’s writing focused on the problems of radical politics in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe. He is the author of two books on the Russian and Polish revolutionary movements in the late nineteenth century. He has also edited or co-edited books and document collections on the nationality problems of the Soviet Union, on the outbreak of World War II on the eastern front, on politics and history in the Soviet Union, on relations between Moscow and the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, on the establishment of communist power in Eastern Europe, on the Soviet occupation of Austria, and on the war in former Yugoslavia. Since publishing a major study of the Soviet occupation of Germany, The Russians in Germany (Harvard 1995) and a comparative study of ethnic cleansing and genocide in 20th Century Europe, Fires of Hatred (Harvard 2001), he has been working on two projects: a Mellon Foundation sponsored seminar series on “Mass Killing in the 20th Century” and a book on “Stalin and Europe, 1945-1953.”
Naimark has held research grants from, among others, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Fulbright, IREX, ACLS, the National Council for Soviet and East European Studies, and the Historische Kommission in Berlin. He has been a research fellow at Warsaw, Jagiellonian, Leningrad, and Berlin Universities and has been a frequent visitor over the past 35 years to Russia/Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, Turkey and Greece. He has twice been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1988-99, 2004-5). In 1995, he received the Richard W. Lyman Award for Outstanding Service to the èצӰ Alumni Association. He twice received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (1992, 2003). In 1996, he was awarded the “Distinguished Service Cross” from the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.