Jonathan Brunstedt

Research Interests

Jonathan Brunstedt is a historian of modern Russia, Eastern Europe, and the twentieth-century world. His research focuses on nationalism and historical memory in the context of the Cold War, particularly in terms of the representation and commemoration of war. He is the author of The Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge University Press), which Foreign Affairs selected as one of its “Best Books of the Year.” Through the lens of the myth and remembrance of victory in World War II, the book examines how a socialist society - ostensibly committed to Marxist ideals of internationalism and global class struggle - came to reconcile itself to notions of patriotism, homeland, Russian ethnocentrism, and the glorification of war. The study follows decades of tensions and competition between Russian-centered and “internationalist” conceptions of victory, arguing that these reflected a wider struggle over the nature of patriotic identity in a multiethnic society that continues to reverberate in the post-Soviet space.  His next book explores, on one hand, how narratives of military victory shape a nation’s identity and perceived role in the world, and, on the other, how political cultures rooted in myths and memories of military triumph respond to the realities of defeat and humiliation in war. The project addresses these questions by focusing on how the United States and Soviet Union projected triumphalist narratives of victory in 1945 to forge ideological justifications for Cold War foreign policies and interventions. At the same time, it examines how traumatic defeats – in Vietnam and Afghanistan – profoundly impacted these rival “cultures of victory.” The project contends that these divergent memory cultures were fundamental to the Cold War’s intensity, longevity, and global reach, and that the legacies of victory cultures continue to shape geopolitics today.

A recipient of the College of Arts & Sciences inaugural Research Impact Award, Brunstedt has published widely, including an award-winning article in Nationalities Papers. He currently holds an Arts & Humanities Fellowship and in 2024 was a Visegrad Fellow at the Open Society Archives in Budapest. His research has been supported by the NEH, the Woodrow Wilson Center Kennan Institute, the Aleksanteri Institute, IREX, and the Scowcroft Institute, among other institutions. Previously, Brunstedt was an assistant professor of Modern European History at Utah State University. He completed his Ph.D. in Modern History and M.Phil., with distinction, at the University of Oxford.

You can read more about Brunstedt’s ongoing research in a recent interview: Drawing Lessons from the Soviet-Afghan War: A Conversation with Title VIII Research Scholar Jonathan Brunstedt

Areas of Speciality

• Russian and Soviet History

• 20th-Century Europe

• Eastern European History

• Cultural Memory