Faculty

Michaela Pohl

Associate Professor of History

  • Office: Old Laundry Building 316
  • Office hours: Tues 1:00-3:00, Thurs 1:00-3:00, Friday By Appt.
  • Phone: 437-5669
  • Box: 125
  • Email: mipohl@vassar.edu

Miki Pohl received her B.A. in Liberal Studies  from the Evergreen State College in Olympia,  Washington (1989), and Ph.D. in modern Russian  history from Indiana University at Bloomington,  Indiana (1999). Her research focuses on the  Soviet Union after Stalin. Other research and  teaching interests include the history of  Kazakhstan and Chechnya, diasporas in the  borderlands of the former Soviet Union, youth  and children in Russia and Europe, and Russian  and Eurasian popular culture.

Pohl is completing a manuscript on the history of Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan. It  focuses on destalinization and the interaction  of various ethnic groups during the Virgin Lands  campaign, a settlement drive that started under  Nikita Khrushchev. Among her recent publications  are "Anna Politkovskaya and Ramzan Kadyrov:  Exposing the Kadyrov Syndrome," in Problems of  Post-Communism, Vol. 54, No. 5,  September-October 2007, pp. 30-39; "The 'Planet  of 100 Languages': Ethnic Relations and Soviet  Identity in the Virgin Lands," in Nicholas  Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard  Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian  Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (London and New York, 2007); and "Women  and Girls in the Virgin Lands," in Melanie Iliç,  Susan E. Reid, and Lynne Attwood, Women in the  Khrushchev Era (Basingstoke and New York, 2004), pp. 52 -74.