Anna Fishzon Assistant Professor of History Ph.D. (2007) Columbia University B.A. (1994) Duke University

Contact Information
NAB Room 253
Phone: 413.597.2364
Anna.Fishzon@williams.edu
Office Hours:
Wednesday 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm
Thursday 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm

Biography
Anna Fishzon is a historian of the Russian Empire, Europe and the Soviet Union.  She was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up primarily in one of the "other" boroughs of New York City.  Anna received her BA from Duke University in North Carolina, where she majored in history and Russian literature.  Upon completing her undergraduate work, she returned to New York, engaged in various practices of self-exploration, escaped briefly to Seattle, and then returned to New York for a second time to begin graduate study at Columbia University, where she earned a PhD in history.  She has been at Williams College since the fall of 2006.

Anna's research interests and course offerings reflect and further her passions for music, literature and visual art, modernism, feminist and queer theory, the history of ideas, and fashion.  Her present research relates opera performance and the commodified personality to prevailing notions of self and affect in fin-de-siècle Russia. Anna studies the way celebrity culture and melodramatic aesthetic practices intersect with revolutionary politics to shape everyday modes of expression and personal ethics.  Currently, she is working on a book manuscript (an expanded version of her dissertation, The Operatic Subject: Fandom, Authenticity, and the Commercialization of Culture in Late Imperial Russia) and completing two articles about the early recording industry and opera fandom.  For her next book project, Anna plans to venture into the late Soviet period to examine children's literary, visual and aural culture.  She is interested in how narrative structures and social types presented in cartoons, literature and records articulated and informed contemporary understandings of childhood and psychology, as well as served broader Soviet efforts at social integration and indoctrination.  Anna is also thinking about dandyism in the USSR and watching sports, probably.

Courses Taught
HIST 141: Modernism, Leisure, and Subjectivity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia
HIST 227: A Century of Revolutions: Europe in the Nineteenth Century
HIST 240: Muscovy and the Russian Empire
HIST 241: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union
HIST 334: Sex and Psyche: A Cultural History of Fin de-Siècle Europe
HIST 395: Fashioning Bodies: Dress, Consumption, and Gender from the Renaissance to the Present
HIST 439: Personality, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Russian Thought
HIST 485T: Stalinist Terror and the New Man
HIST 25 : Fashionable London: Clothing and Fetishism from Victorian Street to Westwood Catwalk (Winter Study Course)

Selected Publications
Mad Acts, Letter Scenes: Fandom, Opera, and Authenticity in Fin de-Siècle Russia (book manuscript in progress)


Research Interests
Modern Russian History; European Cultural and Intellectual History; consumer culture; performance and subjectivity

Program Connections at Williams
Women's and Gender Studies



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