About Adele Lindenmeyr
Adele Lindenmeyr, PhD, is an internationally recognized expert in modern Russian history and the inaugural William and Julia Moulden Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Villanova University. She is the author or co-editor of several books, including Poverty Is Not A Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton University Press, 1996), the winner of the Heldt Prize for Best Book Published by a Woman in Slavic Studies from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Her latest book, Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), the first biography of one of the most prominent women of late imperial Russia, earned a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Award in 2020. ​
Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia
“Feminist aristocrat, social-minded philanthropist, female cabinet minister, ‘class enemy,’ rootless émigré, US citizen! Sofia Panina’s story, embodying revolutionary Russia’s liberal dreams, abounds in contradictions. Its twists and turns and her own dramatic fate are vividly brought to life in Lindenmeyr’s brilliant feat of scholarly detective work. A compelling and illuminating read!”
- Laura Engelstein, Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History, Yale University
“Citizen Countess is the first English-language study of Panina’s life, but it is also much more than a biography: it explores the worlds of pre-revolutionary Petrograd, revolutionary politics, the dislocation of the civil war, and the life of the Russian emigration in both Europe and America. Adele Lindenmeyr contextualizes Panina’s experiences with reference to scholarship in many different fields, giving wider insights into, for example, divorce and homosexuality in pre-revolutionary society, higher education for women in the 1890s, and émigré life in New York and California in the 1930s and 1940s.”
– American Historical Review
“Wonderful job. Great research and solid writing. A real pleasure.”
- Richard G. Robbins, Professor Emeritus of History, University of New Mexico, author of Overtaken by the Night: One Russian's Journey through Peace, War Revolution, and Terror