UMD News Releases

Alexis Pogorelskin

Duluth, MN — Alexis Pogorelskin, associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) has been awarded the first Vera Brittain Fellowship at the Chawton House Library for October 2015. The fellowship is offered in partnership with the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Southampton, Alton, Hampshire, U.K.

In 2015-2016, about 30 scholars within six programs have been invited to the library. Pogorelskin is the first scholar to receive a fellowship under the newly established program, the Vera Brittain/ Society of Women Writers and Journalists Fellowship. Vera Brittain (1893-1970), writer, pacifist and memoirist, was an Honorary Life President of the Society of Women Writers and Journalists, which is supporting this fellowship in her memory.

Chawton House Library is an independent research library and study center focusing on women’s writing in English from 1600 to 1830. Accommodated in the Elizabethan manor house that once belonged to one of Jane Austen’s brothers, the library’s main aim is to promote and facilitate study in the field of early women’s writing. The library was established in 1992 when a 125-year lease for the house was purchased by the co-founders of the technology firm, Cisco Systems.

Pogorelskin is the editor of The NEP Era, Soviet History, 1921-1928 and is on the editorial board of the journal The Space Between. Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. She has recently completed a documentary on the recruitment of North American Finns to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.