Title
U.S.-Russian Relations, Past and Present: Politics, Images, and Historical Memory
Ivan Kurilla and Victoria Zhuraleva will discuss U.S.-Russian Relations and their new book, with co-author David Foglesong, Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: A History of American-Russian Relations. Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies is a bold, sweeping history of the turbulent American-Russian relationship and is unique in being written jointly by American and Russian authors. David Foglesong, Ivan Kurilla and Victoria Zhuravleva together reveal how and why America and Russia shifted from being warm friends and even tacit allies to being ideological rivals, geopolitical adversaries, and demonic foils used in the construction or affirmation of their national identities. As well as examining diplomatic, economic, and military interactions between the two countries, they illuminate how filmmakers, cartoonists, writers, missionaries and political activists have admired, disparaged, lionized, envied, satirized, loved, and hated people in the other land. The book shows how the stories they told and the images they created have shaped how the two countries have understood each other from the eighteenth century to the present and how often their violent clashes have arisen from mutual misunderstanding and misrepresentations.
Speakers
Ivan Kurilla is Visiting Professor of History at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on U.S.-Russian relations, U.S. foreign relations, national identity, the international dimensions of the American Civil War, and the political uses of history. Before coming to Ohio State, he taught at Volgograd State University and the European University at St. Petersburg and held teaching and research positions at Dartmouth College, George Washington University, Bowdoin College, Wellesley College, and Middlebury College.
His recent books include Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: A History of American-Russian Relations, co-authored with David S. Foglesong and Victoria I. Zhuravleva (Cambridge University Press, 2025); The Battle for the Past: How Politics Rewrites History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025); and Americans and All the Rest: Identity and Foreign Policy in U.S. History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026). He is also co-editor, with Victoria Zhuravleva, of Echoes of the American Civil War Abroad: Perceptions, Identities, and Historical Memory (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026). His current research includes a book on Russia and the American Civil War.
Victoria I. Zhuravleva is a professor of history and the chair of the American Studies Department at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia. Her field of research interests is American history with a specialization in Russian-American relations and U.S. foreign policy. She is the author of Understanding Russia in the United States: Images and Myths (in Russian, 2013), The Common Past of Russians and Americans (both in Russian and English, 2021), and the co-author of World History of the 20th Century (in Russian, 2003), Russia and the United States: Diplomatic Relations, 1900-1917 (in Russian, 2009), and Distant Friends and Intimate Enemies: A History of American– Russian Relations, co-authored with David S. Foglesong and Ivan Kurilla (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
She has also edited and co-edited many collective volumes on U.S. history and Russian-American relations. Among them are: Abraham Lincoln: Lessons of History and the Contemporary World (in Russian, 2010), Discover the United States of America (both in Russian and English, 2023), The United States of America in the Past and Present: Pro et Contra (in Russian, 2025), Russian Studies in the United States, Amerikanistika in Russia: Mutual Representations in Academic Project (in English, 2015, co-edited with Ivan Kurilla), War in American Culture: Texts and Contexts (in Russian, co-edited with Irina Morozova, 2017), Revolution and the Revolutionary Discourse in the USA (in Russian, co-edited with Irina Morozova, 2017), Collective Memory: Power of the Past in Sociocultural Life of America (in Russian, co-edited with Irina Morozova, 2021), and Echoes of the American Civil War Abroad: Perceptions, Identities, and Historical Memory (co-edited with Ivan Kurilla, Bloomsbury, 2026). Her current research project examines mutual representations of Russians and Americans in political cartoons.
Victoria Zhuravleva is a member of editorial board of such peer-reviewed academic journals as Amerikanskii ezhegodnik (The American Year-Book), Sravnitel'naia politika (Comparative Politics); Novaya i Noveishaya Istoria (Modern History), Vestnik RGGU (RSUH/RGGU Bulletin. Series: Politics. History, and International Relations), Journal of Russian-American Studies (JRAS). She is an Alumna of the Fulbright Program and the Kennan Institute Program.
