Ethan Pollock

Brown University

Ethan Pollock is a professor of history and professor of Slavic Studies at Brown University. He was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After receiving a BA from Tufts University in 1991, he moved to Moscow, Russia, where he taught U.S. history and was the associate producer of a documentary film on the Soviet atomic bomb project. He received his PhD in Russian and Soviet history from UC Berkeley in 2000.

Pollock is the author of Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse (Oxford, 2019), which retells the history of Imperial Russia, the rise of fall of communism, and the emergence of post-communist Russia through the lens of the ubiquitous and widely popular Russian steam bath. He is also the author of Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, 2006; in paperback, 2008), which examines Soviet politics, science, and ideology during the last years of Joseph Stalin’s life and the first years of the Cold War.

Pollock has been a fellow at George Washington University, Columbia University (Harriman Institute), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, and the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He was a faculty member in the History Department at Syracuse University from 2003-2006. Since 2006 he has been on faculty at Brown University where he teaches courses on Russian history, the history of the Cold War, and the history of the nuclear age.

Pollock’s videos are used in the following Choices Program curriculum units:
The Russian Revolution
The Weimar Republic and the Rise of Nazi Germany