academia

Details:

Kocho-Williams, Alastair, The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 86, Number 1, 1 January 2008 , pp. 90-110(21)

Abstract:

This article offers a case study of a commissariat and its members during Stalin’s purges. It considers the effects of the purges on diplomats and on Soviet diplomacy, adding new dimensions to previous works, in particular dealing with how the Foreign Commissar Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov and the Soviet diplomats serving under him responded to the purges, what their opinions of them were, and how they dealt with the challenge of explaining the purges to observers abroad, as well as examining the numbers that perished, what they were accused of, why the Narkomindel was so vulnerable to the purges, how the Narkomindel struggled to function effectively during a difficult time in Soviet foreign relations, and how the regime achieved a withdrawal from international affairs.

…in the iTunes U project  Could be good for the world in general, but really good from the point if view of publicity. I can heartily  recommend these lectures.  There’s some great stuff and some truly interesting speakers.

Flowing out of me at the moment, and I need to log them in some way so I don’t forget these good (well ok seemingly good) ideas.

It occurred to me that there is some mileage in looking at the Comintern in Stalin’s purges in a similar vein to my work on the topic with the Soviet diplomatic corps. There is lots of material on the purges and the Comintern already, but I feel that as with my article on the diplomatic corps (forthcoming in Slavonic and East European Review, there is a contribution to be made on the way in which Comintern agents responded to the purges.

I feel that this would be a fruitful line of enquiry, and will be particularly interesting in different national contexts. Spain will present quite a different picture to Germany or Great Britain.

I’m struggling to get my head around how to present archival references in the Harvard system.  They appear to be the lacuna of the system, and I just can’t work out how best to produce the references in text.  The list at the end is fine, but what goes in the bracket?!?

This occured to me as a result of reading some other academic blogs, one of which deals specifcally with technology in history teaching (the excellent edwired).   It lead me to thinking about whether I could be encouraging  colleagues to blog, as I believe it is valuable and could be a benefit for them.

Blogs can of course be used for teaching as well as personal reflection.  One of the great strengths of them is the number of ways in which they can be used.  I feel that they are particularly useful for the research process, and can be used as a good tool in research supervision (I was supposed to keep a research diary when I did my PhD, but I did little with it and nobody checked).  I did find blogging useful when coming to my viva, as I was able to clarify some thoughts in writing and reflect on the process.

As a teacher I find blogs to be of use in reflecting on the teaching process.  I can write reflectively on classes and on other aspects of the role - I have in the past written a number of posts considering being fair when marking work that is in one’s own research field

I’m just about done putting together a module handbook for a new course I’ll be teaching this year. This is the first module that I’ve built myself, having stepped in to cover research leave and teaching courses that were already running in the past.

It has been quite a challenge, and very time consuming. One of the issues I have run into is trying to get a balance of material so that there is enough material for students to use, while at the same time not overloading them. Topics have also been hard to choose in this field (Russian foreign policy), as I am extremely unlikely to have students with a command of Russian, which limits the material that can be used somewhat. I think I have managed to strike a good balance, although there are some areas where there is a great deal more material than others (rather predictably) in English.

I can only hope that the students find the handbook effective as a means of supporting the module and guiding them to reading.

I’m a fan of blogging for students, but it’s hard to get them to do it.

This might help

I’m going to try setting my seminars up a little differently for my Tsars and Commissars module this coming year. I’m going to be piloting the use of blackboard with students, and will be getting them to make a 100 word comment based on a question. I’ve done this before at Leeds with success - although students complain at the time it’s a lot of work (some of them clearly intended to do none), in retrospect they tend to agree that its valuable.

This year I’m going to deviate slightly from the way I’d done it before, where I set a question that could be delt with from general reading and am going to pose a question based on a documentary source. Hopefully this will mean that some thinking will have happened, and I will have them critically analysing documents. This I feel can only make them better historians, but we’ll see…

The marking process is finally over, but some matters for thought arose during discussions to agree marks.

The biggest issue is one that I have raised before, and which still bothers me, concerning students who answer questions that relate to one’s own particular field. This has been a tough issue on a second year course I teach in International History 1914-1945 (dealing with the foreign policy of Britain, the US, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia/Soviet Union amongst others). Students are drawn frequently to questions on Germany and the Soviet Union, which is unsurprising given students general level of interest in twentieth century Russian and German history and not necessarily a problem. The issue arises when a student misses material that one feels might have been included, or when they argue, not always convincingly, a line that you don’t agree with. The problem then is trying to remain objective and assessing the student on the level of knowledge for an undergraduate, not necesarily holding them to the standard of ourselves.

Tricky. Although I do believe we are engaged as teachers of history in (re)producing historians, we do need to be sensitive to the fact that this is a road we have travelled (and contiue to travel), while the undergraduate has begun their journey, but later than us.

I just came accross these while marking.

“the Communist party and capitalist political parties would be power showering Eastern Europe and Western Europe”

“the Communist Manifest”

[sic]. I laughed hard.