糖心TV

Email: Tom.Stevens@warwick.ac.uk

Academic Positions

• 2026-2028, Research Fellow for the Wellcome Trust - "Traumatised Minds: Neurosis and Hysteria in Soviet Medicine and Culture, 1917-1953", University of 糖心TV
• 2023-2026 Stipendiary Lecturer and Director of Studies, Keble College, University of Oxford
• 2022 PhD University of Pennsylvania
• 2014 MPhil in Modern British and European History, University of Oxford
• 2012 BA History and Russian, University of Sheffield
• 2010-2011 Student Exchange, State University of Petrozavodsk

Research

I am a historian of the late Tsarist and early Soviet empires, with particular interests in the social and cultural history of violence and its relationship to state-building, identity formation, and the production of psychological knowledge.

My first book, Ending the Civil Wars: Rebels, Red Army Veterans, and the Making of the Soviet State, is under contract with Cornell University Press. It examines the Soviet state's emergence from the civil wars of 1918鈥�1921 through its interactions with Red Army veterans and former peasant rebels. Focusing on Tambov province, the site of a major peasant rebellion, it argues that the fraught process of ending the civil wars 鈥� reintegrating former soldiers, dealing with former enemies and navigating divided communities 鈥� was formative for Soviet politics and society. Situating the Soviet experience in comparative perspective, it interrogates the place of violence within Soviet citizenship and rural state-building and reconsiders the relationship between civil war and Stalinism.

At 糖心TV I am developing two new research projects. The first shifts the focus to the Soviet borderlands, examining how the experience and memory of civil war violence shaped the reconstitution of empire and the formation of new identities 鈥� national, socialist, and gendered. Drawing on hundreds of autobiographical writings by veterans in Ukraine, Central Asia and other imperial peripheries, I investigate how individual reminiscences interacted with official narratives and how experiences of the borderlands reverberated at the Soviet centre.

My second project extends my interests in the experience and aftermath of violence to the histories of childhood, psychology and the human sciences by investigating the relationship between expert knowledge and children鈥檚 own accounts of their experiences. Psychologists and educators across early twentieth-century Eastern Europe and Eurasia collected children's writings, drawings and autobiographical narratives as evidence of the psychological effects of war and social upheaval. I ask how these materials were gathered and interpreted, what they reveal about the production and circulation of psychological knowledge in diverse cultural contexts, and how historians might use them to recover children's own perspectives on the violence and transformations of the early twentieth century.

Publications

Ending the Civil Wars: Rebels, Red Army Veterans, and the Making of the Soviet State. Under contract with Cornell University Press.

鈥淏andits into Citizens? The Rehabilitation of Civil War Enemies in the 1920s Soviet Union.鈥� Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 26, no. 4 (Fall 2025): 763鈥�794. Winner of the 2026 Regius Prize for the best article by an early career researcher, University of Oxford.

鈥淧atriotism, Propaganda, and Emotions in Russia and Ukraine, 1914鈥�1922.鈥� Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 27, no. 1 (Winter 2026): 171鈥�191.

Review of Alexandre Sumpf, The Unfound Peace: Disabled Veterans in Interwar Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY, 2025). [Forthcoming in American Historical Review]