Olga Litvak, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Department of History
Clark University
Worcester, MA 01610-1477
Phone: 508-793-7254
Email: olitvak@clarku.edu
Professor Litvak, a graduate of Columbia University, specializes in Eastern European and modern Jewish history. Her first book, Conscription and the Search for Modern Russian Jewry (Indiana UP, 2006), analyzes the cultural ramifications of Russian Jewry's first experience of conscription into the Russian army. She has written and lectured ona wide range of subjects related to the study of Russian Jewry, including urban violence, literary and artistic life, war, revolution and migration. The editor of the "Painting and Sculpture" section of the landmark YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (Yale, 2008), Prof. Livtak has also been pursuing the study of Jewish participation in the making of modern Russian visual culture. Her current project is a biography of the Jewish writer and cultural entrepreneur, Sholem-aleichem.
She has taught at Columbia College, the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow and most recently at Princeton and at SUNY Albany, where she also served as director of the Center for Jewish Studies. She offers courses in modern Jewish and Russian history, with a special emphasis on art and literature.