Comparative Humanities
Education
- Ph.D. in Modern European History, the University of Texas at Austin, USA, 2015
- B.A. in History, the University of Iowa, USA, 2007
Teaching and Research Experience
- British Academy Newton International Fellow, Politics and International Relations, Loughborough University, Spring 2018 to Spring 2020
- Postdoctoral Research Fellow, the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Fall 2016 to Spring 2018
Courses Taught
- Russia since 1917
- Russia to 1917
- Russia and the World: Global Interactions from Peter I to Putin
- Core 101 Rhetoric and Communication: Amateur Culture and Media
- Understanding History
- Approaches to History
- Perspectives in the History of Science and Math
Biography
Jessica Werneke received her Ph.D. in Modern European History with a concentration in Russian and Soviet visual culture from the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She has since held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the International Centre for the History of World War II and its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow Russia and was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at Loughborough University in the UK. Dr. Werneke has taught broadly in history, but primarily courses on historiography and modern Russian cultural history.
Dr. Werneke’s research interests lie in Soviet visual culture and has spent the majority of her academic career examining the Soviet photography journal Sovetskoe foto (The Soviet Photo). Her PhD and subsequent articles have focused on Soviet photography and the intersections of art and photojournalism in Soviet Russia after World War II. Similarly, her current research investigates the history of amateur photography clubs in the USSR, particularly those in the former Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Selected Publications
- “What/Which Truth? Photography and Photojournalism in the Soviet Union,” The Untruths of Photography, ed. Nancy Pedri and Agnes Neier, special issue of Image & Narrative, 21 (1), pp. 44-62. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/2457
- “Soviet Photography in America: An Introduction to the New York Public Library’s Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary Slavic, East European and Baltic Collection,” Slavic and East European Information Resources, 19 (3-4), pp. 369-421. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15228886.2018.1539061
- “‘Nobody Understands What is Beautiful and What is Not;’ Governing Amateur Photography and Photography Clubs in the Late Soviet Period,” Photography and Culture, 12 (1), pp. 47-68. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17514517.2019.1581473
- “The Lithuanian SSR Society of Art Photography: Photographic Organizations in the Soviet Periphery,” Peripheral Histories. https://www.peripheralhistories.co.uk/post/the-lithuanian-ssr-society-of-art-photography-photographic-organizations-in-the-soviet-periphery
