Faculty research is vital ...
Roger Reese, one of the most successful historians of modern Russia, has published his seventh book! Russia’s Army: A History from the Napoleonic Wars to the War in Ukraine (University of Oklahoma Press). He examines the Russian military over a span of three centuries, connecting tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet histories rom Alexander I to Vladimir Putin. This approach allows Reese to consider the development of the Russian army in the context of vast diplomatic, political, economic, and social changes across Europe and the world from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the present.
Russia’s Army is a social and institutional history that engages the twin challenges the army confronted: those relating to foreign policy and those arising from internal unrest. While Russia always had a large standing army, as Reese explains neither its massive size nor service in it were uniformly desirable. Reese’s attention to uneasiness about the size of the military as well as public opinion on its nature, during both war and peace, demonstrate the importance of considering the relationship between the military and society. His consideration of the complex ways the army responded to, and sometimes shaped, foreign relations greatly enhances our understanding of how the army operated on a world stage.
Reese’s next project continues to study the Russian military. It is tentatively entitled “From Peter to Putin: The Russians and their Army.”
Professor Sonia Hernandez has become one of the most renowned historians of the Texas-Mexican border. In the last years she has published two books, Working Women into the Borderlands (also translated into Spanish) and most recently For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900-1938. She also has co-edited a volume on Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border.
Dr. Hernandez has won a Fulbright fellowship to continue her research on the borderlands, and significantly she was a co-founder and has been involved in a non-profit public history project, “Refusing to Forget.” Its mission is to reach out to the public with its website (refusingtoforget.org) and promote photography, historical markers, documentaries, and museum exhibits. From 2023 to 2025 the organization is sponsoring a traveling exhibit, “Life and Death on the Border 1910-1920.” Op-Ed pieces and articles about their research have appeared in many venues, including the Austin-American Statesman, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post, and Time magazine.
Texas A&M has supported her research by awarding her a Chancellor Enhancing Development and Generating Excellence in Scholarship, or the EDGES Fellowship. She is at work on her third research monograph on transnational state violence thanks to the EDGES fellowship and a 2019 Fulbright fellowship.