West Virginia University

Dr. Robert Blobaum

Eberly Professor

Dr. Robert Blobaum

Teaching Fields:

Modern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Imperial Russia

Contact:

Robert Blobaum
220 D Woodburn Hall
P.O. Box 6303
Morgantown, WV 26506-6303
Phone: (304) 293-2421 ext. 5241
Fax: (304) 293-3616
Robert.Blobaum@mail.wvu.edu

  • Degrees

      PhD., University of Nebraska, 1981

  • Research Interests

      I have been through a few incarnations during the course of my career—from a political/intellectual historian early on, to a social historian of politics in mid-career, to a senior scholar who refuses to be pigeon-holed but is interested in a broad range of economic, social, cultural, political and gender issues. I am also interested in employing a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to telling what I hope are compelling stories of what happened in a particular place (central Poland) at a critical juncture in historical time (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). And, with the acquisition of experience and perspective, my work has become increasingly transnational and comparative, with an increasing appeal to audiences who share those interests. Although my work remains Poland-centered, my stories—most recently about antisemitism, criminality and deviance—are better told in larger European frameworks. This is particularly important to a field, such as East European history, that has long been ghettoized.
      My current research project is now at an intermediate stage, having been initiated a couple of years ago. It has been well over thirty years since Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz published his relatively brief history of Warsaw during the First World War. Although Dunin was not particularly interested in fitting Warsaw’s experience into the national narrative of Poland’s recovery of state independence and he did address issues related to everyday life during the war, his book was not deeply researched and it avoided—understandable in the Polish political and cultural climate of the 1970s—some fundamental and controversial questions. Principal among them was the impact of a general atmosphere of physical and material deprivation—which became increasingly debilitating as the war continued into 1916 and 1917—on already poisoned Polish-Jewish relations in the city. And, while Dunin took note of such matters as the causes of a dramatically increasing demographic preponderance of women over men by 1917, he never sought to explore the meaning and consequences of the feminization of Warsaw’s population. These are but two examples of the shortcomings of Dunin’s small book, the totality of which call for a new, major project devoted to Warsaw during the Great War, one that I have tentatively titled A Minor Apocalypse: Everyday Life in Warsaw during the First World War. Such a study will also contribute to a growing literature on the trials, tribulations, conflicts and traumas among non-combatants in Europe’s capital and larger cities brought on by the continent’s first total war.

  • Grad Students Advised

  • Courses Offered

      SEES 101-Introduction to Slavic and East European Studies
      HIST 417-World War II in Europe
      HIST 418-Eastern Europe since 1945
      HIST 708-Reading Seminar in Central European History
      HIST 709-Research Seminar in Central European History
      HIST 714-Readings Seminar in East European History
      HIST 715-Research Seminar in East European History

  • Publications

      Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Cornell University Press, 2005)

      Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904-1907 (Cornell University Press, 1995)

      “The ‘Woman Question’ in Russian Poland, 1890-1914,” Journal of Social History (Summer
      2002)

      “The Politics of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siecle Warsaw,” Journal of Modern History (June 2001)

      To Market! To Market! The Polish Peasantry in the Era of the Stolypin Reforms (Slavic Review, 2000)