Stephen V. Bittner

Professor Stephen V. Bittner is a native of St. Joseph, Michigan, on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan. He received his BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1993, along with a lifelong devotion to Michigan football and ice hockey. His PhD is from the University of Chicago in 2000. Before coming to Sonoma State University in 2002, Bittner was a visiting professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and a fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C.

 

In addition to many articles and reviews, Bittner is the author of Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar (Oxford, 2021), The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw (Cornell, 2008), and the editor of Dmitrii Shepilov’s memoir, The Kremlin’s Scholar (Yale, 2007). Bittner has a couple of different projects currently underway, including a history of the Soviet presence in Antarctica, and an investigation of the places where refugees from Bolshevism encountered refugees from Nazism. Bittner has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities (twice), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies (twice). He has appeared on MSNBC, BBC Radio 5, Al Jazeera, and Radio France Internationale.