Maria Fedorova
Assistant Professor
Russian history, transnational history of food and agriculture
Humanities 207
[email protected]
Maria Fedorova arrived at Macalester in the fall of 2019 as a Wallin Postdoctoral Fellow in Russian and Modern European History. A Moscow native, she came to the United States as a Fulbright Fellow, receiving an MA degree in History at Washington State University and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Fedorova’s research focuses on the transnational circulation of knowledge and technologies between Russia/Soviet Union and the world during the twentieth century.
Her first book Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in Agriculture, 1921-1935 (forthcoming in August 2025 with the Northern Illinois University Press) focuses on the American and Soviet exchange of agricultural knowledge and technology during the interwar period. Amid the post鈥揥orld War I food insecurity, Soviet and American agricultural experts relied on transnational networks, bridging ideological differences. As Soviets traveled across the US agricultural regions and Americans plowed steppes in the southern Urals and the lower Volga, both groups believed that innovative solutions could be found beyond their own national borders.
Fedorova teaches courses on Russian and Soviet history, the transnational history of food and agriculture, and the history of science and technology. Her courses are cross-listed with the History Department and the Food, Agriculture, and Society concentration.
Selected Publications:
- Seeds of Exchange: Soviets, Americans, and Cooperation in
Agriculture, 1921-1935 (Northern Illinois University Press,
forthcoming in August 2025). - 鈥淢apping Food 鈥 Teaching Global Connections,鈥 Agricultural
History 97, no. 4 (November 2023): 673-676. - 鈥淏read or Iron? Competing Visions of American Aid to Soviet
Russia, 1921-1923,鈥 Agricultural History 97, no. 2 (May 2023):
245-272. - 鈥The Untold Story of 鈥淩adical Relief鈥 to Soviet Russia,鈥 NYU
Jordan Center Blog, March 28, 2023. - 鈥淎merican Tractors, Soviet Soil: Agricultural Reconstruction
and U.S.-Soviet Technology Transfer, 1921-23,鈥 in Anthony J.
Heywood, Scott W. Palmer, and Julia A. Lajus, eds., Science,
Technology, Environment, and Medicine in Russia鈥檚 Great War
and Revolution, 1914-1922 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2022):
203-228. - Translation: Evgenii O. Naumov, 鈥淭he Red Army and
Epidemic Disease in the Russian Civil War,鈥 trans. by Maria
Fedorova in Anthony J. Heywood, Scott W. Palmer, and Julia
A. Lajus, eds., Science, Technology, Environment, and
Medicine in Russia鈥檚 Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922
(Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2022): 471-494. - 鈥淪eeds as Technology: The Russian Agricultural Bureau in New
York and Soviet Agricultural Modernization, 1921-26,鈥 Russian
Review 80, no. 2 (April 2021): 209-228.