History professor awarded ACLS grant to study Russian peasantry

Colleen Moore, a history professor at James Madison University, was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Project Development Grant for her project, “At War with the State: Russian Peasants, Mass Mobilization, and the End of the Autocracy.” Her project explores how the mobilization of the Russian peasant population for the First World War undermined peasants’ faith in the autocracy and transformed their understanding of state power.

Moore was one of 14 awardees. ACLS Project Development Grants support faculty at teaching-intensive universities whose research projects will advance humanistic studies and interpretive social sciences. Grantees receive $5,000, which may be used for any costs that support their research project. Moore plans to use her award to support the completion of her book manuscript and offset conference travel and research costs.

The project draws on research conducted in Russian archives during the 2009-10 academic year, when Moore was a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) fellow, and in the summer of 2011. Moore also received a 2020 College of Arts and Letters Summer Research Grant to finance a research trip to Russian archives in Tambov and Penza as soon as Russia reopens its borders to foreign researchers.

Moore earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington and joined the Department of History as an assistant professor in 2018. She teaches classes on imperial Russian history, Soviet history, and world history, and conducts research on late imperial Russia/early Soviet Russia, the Russian peasantry and World War I.