Humanities Staff

Dr Melanie Ilic

Position
Reader, History
Faculty Research Degree Tutor

Contact
Email: milic@glos.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1242 714698

Teaching
Melanie Ilic teaches Russian and Soviet history and British women’s history.

Research and Publications
My research focuses primarily on Soviet women’s history and I have published widely on this topic. Major publications include: Women Workers in the Soviet Inter-War Economy: From 'Protection' to 'Equality' (Macmillan, 1999) and edited editions of essays on Women in the Stalin Era (Palgrave, 2001) and with Susan E. Reid and Lynne Attwood, Women in the Khrushchev Era (Palgrave, 2004).

In connection with my Research Fellowship at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, European Research Institute, The University of Birmingham, I have been part of international research teams on several nationally-funded projects, including: ESRC-funded, three-year project on ‘Terror, War Preparations and Soviet Economic Development’ and AHRC-funded, three-year project on ‘Policy and Governance in the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev’.

My work on the terror has progressed the area of ‘victim studies’: ‘The Great Terror in Leningrad: a Quantitative Analysis’, Europe-Asia Studies (2000; reprinted 2002), ‘The Forgotten Five Per Cent: Women, Political Repression and the Purges’ and with C. Joyce, ‘Remembering the Victims of Political Repression: the Purges in Mordoviya’ both in M. Ilic (ed), Stalin’s Terror Revisited (Palgrave, 2006).

Recent work on the Khrushchev era includes a study on ‘What did Women Want? Khrushchev and the Revival of the Zhensovety’, in M. Ilic and J.R. Smith (eds), Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev (Routledge, 2009) and with R.W. Davies, ‘From Khrushchev (1935-36) to Khrushchev (1956-64): Construction Policy Compared’ in J.R. Smith and M. Ilic (eds), Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the USSR, 1953-64 (Routledge, forthcoming).

I have recently also written on and edited a set of articles on Soviet women and civil defence in the 1930s for Minerva Journal of Women and War, vol. 1, no. 2, 2008. I am currently researching Soviet women’s involvement in the Women’s International Democratic Federation for an international project co-ordinated in Finland on ‘Knowledge through the Iron Curtain’, looking at the processes of technology transfer and cultural exchange during the Cold War. I am also preparing a documents reader on Russian and Soviet women’s history.

Postgraduate supervision
I have supervised and examined postgraduate student dissertations in the fields of Soviet history and women’s history.