U.Va.’s Rossman Receives Fellowship to Study Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’

University of Virginia history professor Jeffrey J. Rossman has received a one-year Collaborative Research Fellowship for $45,000 from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Rossman, an associate professor in the Corcoran Department of History in the College of Arts & Sciences, will be working with Lynne A. Viola, a professor at the University of Toronto, on reframing the history of Soviet mass violence in the 1930s and 1940s.

They will co-write “Stalin’s Great Terror,” a volume of scholarly criticism on the mass violence and its aftermath, and will also publish annotated collections of documentary evidence about the Great Terror’s greatest perpetrators.

Rossman and Viola were among seven fellowship teams recently announced by the American Council of Learned Societies. These teams were selected for funding because they crossed boundaries of discipline, methodology and geography to undertake new research projects that will result in joint publications. The program, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to demonstrate the creative potential of collaborative research in the humanities and related social sciences.

“The 2013 ACLS Collaborative Research fellows come from a range of humanities fields, but more importantly, they represent collaborations across all faculty ranks and stages of the academic career,” said Nicole Stahlmann , ACLS director of fellowship programs. “The continuous diversification of the applicant pool over the past five years of the program suggests that collaborative research is gaining traction among both tenured and untenured scholars.”

ACLS, a private, nonprofit federation of 71 national scholarly organizations, is a pre-eminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. Advancing scholarship by awarding fellowships and strengthening relations among learned societies are central to its work.

This year’s cohort will pursue projects on topics ancient and modern, from a variety of disciplinary angles.