James Nealy received his PhD from Duke University in May of 2022. A specialist in the economic, social, and intellectual history of the Soviet Union and the world, his writing has appeared in Kritika and Revolutionary Russia. Along with Emily Elliott he is the co-editor of the volume, under contract with Lexington Books, Soviet Workers in the World: Soviet Labor and Working-Class History in Global Context. His research and writing have been funded by, among others, the Fulbright Program, the American Historical Association, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Dr. Nealy is the recipient of three writing awards, including the Southern Historical Association’s Parker-Schmitt Award for best dissertation in European history and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies' Tucker-Cohen Dissertation Prize for best dissertation in the history or politics of Russia. His article, "The Shchekino Method: Flexible Production with Socialist Characteristics" recently won the Contemporary European History Essay Prize and will appear in a forthcoming volume of that journal. He has previously held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University. At the Jordan Center, Dr. Nealy will continue work on his first book manuscript. Tentatively titled Making Socialism Work: Economic Reform and the Soviet Enterprise, 1950s-2000, it seeks to understand how the Soviet Union's position within the global capitalist economy affected factory-level initiatives designed to make socialism work better. Email: jamesnealy@fas.harvard.edu
September 2024 - August 2025
