Faculty

Frank Wcislo
Associate Professor of History
Dean of The Ingram Commons

PhD, Columbia, 1984

Early modern and modern Russia; U.S.S.R.; Eurasia; empire and imperial society; politics and culture; biography; undergraduate education.

Telephone:  615-343-9628
Email: francis.w.wcislo@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 12:30-1:30 or e-mail Christina.m.bailey@vanderbilt.edu for appt. in Suite 203 Commons Center
Office Address: 203 Commons Center, Peabody #621, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, Tennessee  37203-5721

His personal website is https://my.vanderbilt.edu/franciswcislo 

Frank Wcislo is a historian of modern Russia, Eurasia, and Europe.  He came to Vanderbilt in 1984 from Columbia University and has taught as Visiting Professor in the School of History, University of Leeds (1994-95).  His research incorporates issues of politics, identity, and culture in the prerevolutionary Russian Empire. He is the author of Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society, and National Politics, 1855-1914 (Princeton, 1990), a study of imperial political culture, bureaucratic attempts to transform it during the last half century of tsarist rule, and the implications of these efforts for the multiple crises that weakened the old regime before 1917.   His Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2011), a historical study that reconsiders these same last decades via the methodology of biographical narrative and the use of autobiographical memories as sources.  It is a study of Russian imperial identity, culture, and experience.  He was a collaborator and member of the editorial board in the publication project of the St. Petersburg Institute of History [Russian Academy of Sciences] and The Bakhmetieff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture [Columbia University], Iz arkhiva S. Iu. Vitte. Vospominaniia. [From the Archive of S. Iu. Witte. Memoirs], 3 vols. [St. Petersburg, Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003].  His research has been supported by the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Kennan Institute (Smithsonian), Vanderbilt University and its Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, and The Harriman Institute of Columbia University.

Wcislo is a prize-winning teacher.  He is a recipient of the Jeffrey Nordhaus Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the College of Arts and Science (1993), the Alumni Education Award of the Vanderbilt Alumni Association (1998), The Madison Sarratt University Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Education (2003), and the Alumni Freshman Adviser Award of the College of Arts and Science (2006).  He has taught and team-taught a range of courses to undergraduates, graduate students, and continuing adult education:  the introductory Columbia University Contemporary Civilization core curriculum; survey lecture courses on medieval and early modern Russia, pre-revolutionary imperial Russia, soviet and post-soviet history, European civilization since 1700, comparative communisms in Russia and China, and  concepts of liberty; seminars on the end of the Soviet empire, the Russian revolution, late imperial Russian intellectual history, agrarian Russia from serfdom to collectivization, gender in modern Russian history and literature (seminar), and historical methods and research.  He established and has frequently served as the Director of the Honors Program in History. 

In July 2006, Wcislo was appointed to be the first Dean of The Commons, Vanderbilt’s new campus and collaborative learning community of resident and affiliated faculty, first-year students, and staff professionals.  While continuing to be an active member of the Department of History, he will live in The Commons, together with ten other resident Faculty Heads, and be the intellectual and community leaders of the first-year undergraduate educational experience at Vanderbilt.  He invites faculty colleagues, graduate students, and undergraduates to come to The Commons, sample, and participate in a re-envisioning of undergraduate education at a major private research university.