Bio
Dr. James T. Andrews is distinguished University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Modern Russian and Comparative European/Eurasian history at Iowa State University (ISU). At ISU, he has been the Inaugural Director of the University Center for Excellence in the Humanities and the Arts (2010 – 2014, Provost Appointment). He has also been Director of ISU’s Ph.D. Program and Inter-Disciplinary Center for the Historical Studies of Technology and Science (2006-2009), Director of Russian, East European, & Central Asian Studies (2004-2006 – LAS Dean’s Appointment), and Director of Graduate Studies in History (2001-2003).
Professor Andrews received his Ph.D. in Modern Russian/Soviet history from the University of Chicago and has taught as a visiting professor at several research institutions including the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and the State University of New York.
Since the summer of 1995, he has been affiliated as a senior research associate with the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for the History of the Natural Sciences and Technology. He has been the recipient of numerous teaching awards on campus, including the Louis Thompson Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award. In 2006, he was awarded the first Cassling Family Endowed Faculty Award for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching in the Humanities. In 2007, at Iowa State, he was awarded the University Outstanding Achievement in Teaching Award. In 2009, he was short-listed for the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher National Distinguished Teaching Award.
His five books and numerous articles have analyzed the intersection of science/technology, society, and public culture in Modern Russia and in a comparative Eurasian framework. He is the author of Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry (2009) and Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917-34 (2003). He is also the co-editor of Art and the Global City: Public Space, Transformative Media, and the Politics of Urban Rhetoric (2022), co-editor of Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture (2011), and editor of Maksim Gor’kii Revisited: Science, Academics and Revolution (1995). He is currently writing a new survey monograph entitled Wondrous Visions: A History of Science and European Culture from Copernicus to the Nuclear Age. His most recent research monograph in progress, a history of the Moscow Metro, is tentatively entitled Iconic Metropolitan: Mass Mobility, Architectural Visions, and the Politics of Urban Space in Modern Russia.
Dr. Andrews has been the recipient of numerous distinguished research fellowships that include the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars Senior Residency Grant, Fulbright-Hays US Department of Education & State Fellowship, International Research Exchange Board, American Council of Teachers/Researchers of Russian Studies, Social Science Research Council, National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Grant, and most recently was a Senior Research Scholar Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution for War, Peace, and Revolution.
Ask An Historian
What is a favorite document that you’ve found in the archives?
I have spent the last four decades working in Russian archives, which are mostly filled with either typed or hand-written documents/letters. During the last few years, however, I have been working in several fascinating architectural and photographic archives in Moscow, including both original photographic negatives as well as architectural drawings/plans. Using these visual sources has been exciting and challenging in new methodological ways for me.