Acclaimed Historian Benjamin Nathans Will Be This Year's Phi Alpha Theta Speaker

The Phi Alpha Theta Induction Ceremony and Lecture for the 2024-25 academic year will take place on Thursday, May 1, 2025, from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The event will be held in Fahy Hall, Room 7, located in the basement amphitheater.

The Department of History is proud to announce that Benjamin Nathans, the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, will be this year’s (2024-25) Phi Alpha Theta speaker. Professor Nathans will deliver a lecture “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.”

Benjamin Nathans teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history and the history of human rights. He edited "A Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry" (19th and Early 20th Centuries) in "Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union" [in Russian] (Moscow, 1994) and is author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002), which won the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, the Lincoln Prize in Russian History and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. Beyond the Pale has been translated into Russian (2007) and Hebrew (2013). Nathans has published articles on Habermas and the public sphere in eighteenth-century France, Russian-Jewish historiography, Soviet dissident memoirs and many other topics. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and an occasional commentator on current Russian affairs.

Nathans' most recent book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, 2024), tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin's death to the collapse of communism. It explores the idea and practice of rights and the rule of law in the setting of “mature socialism.” Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their invocation of rights and legal norms as natural, "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause" investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms. Understanding this process - how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissidents promoted the containment of Soviet power from within - promises to illuminate the broader problem of how citizens of authoritarian societies conceive and act on options for political engagement.

The Phi Alpha Theta event on May 1 will feature an induction ceremony for the new National History Honor Society members. The induction will be followed by Professor Nathan’s lecture and reception.

Partial funding for this event has been provided by the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences thanks to the generous support of the President's Advisory Council members. 

Categories: Education