The latest author to answer our Q&A call is Michael David-Fox, author of the new book Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union. UPP: You’ve spent nearly two decades studying various aspects of Russian history. What intrigues you most about the region? MDF: When I first got into Russian Studies I was captivated by the nineteenth-century intelligentsia and its classic thinkers, from Herzen to Lenin. I was drawn in by the “cursed questions” about Russia and the West and the role of the revolutionary movement. The Possessed is still my favorite Dostoevsky novel. There was…

Acclaimed, prolific philosopher Nicholas Rescher is featured in our newest Q&A. His latest book is A Journey through Philosophy in 101 Anecdotes. UPP: You earned your doctorate at Princeton in 1951 at the age of 22, a record for that university’s philosophy department, and have been hard at work in the field ever since. So, why philosophy as a career? NR: At the outset my career choice ran neck and neck between philosophy and mathematics. But I found that I had to work at mathematics while philosophy seemed to come naturally. UPP: In the Introduction to your new book, A Journey…

UPP welcomes Nicholas A. Brown and Sarah E. Kanouse, authors of the forthcoming Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest as the first of our authors to be featured in a Q&A. UPP: What was your inspiration for Re-Collecting Black Hawk? NB: There’s no one moment that inspired the project; rather it was an organic outgrowth of our artistic and scholarly interests and quirks of personal history that all came together at the right time. I actually grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, surrounded by references to Black Hawk. As a kid I walked to Blackhawk Country…

Robert D. Lifset is the Donald Keith Jones Assistant Professor of Honors and History at the University of Oklahoma. Lifset’s research and teaching interests focus on energy history broadly defined. This includes the business, policy, political, environmental, social and cultural history of energy with a focus, though not exclusive, on the United States in the 20th century. His books include Power on the Hudson, Storm King Mountain and The Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism (2014) and American Energy Policy in the 1970s (2014). Lifset is currently researching a history of the energy crisis of the 1970s.  Robert Lifset is also the founding web and list editor…