Professional and Biographical Information

Degrees

Ph.D., Columbia University (1969)
M.A., Columbia University (1965)
Certificate of the Russian Institute, Columbia University (1965)
A.B. Harvard College (1962)
A.M. (honorary) Amherst College (1978)

Teaching Interests

One of the virtues of teaching at Amherst is that almost everyone is drawn into offering interdisciplinary courses, jointly taught with colleagues from other departments, that transcend any single professor's specialities. In my case, such courses have included "Totalitarianism," "War," "Poverty," "Perspectives on the Professions," "National Identity," and "Personality and Political Leadership." Besides being wonderfully stimulating in themselves, these ventures have the added virtue of enriching one's own specialized courses, in my case, classes such as "Russian Politics," and "Rethinking the Cold War." Most recently, I offered a seminar on "Gorbachev, the End of the Cold War, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union," in which students joined me in trying to research and understand the arc and impact of Gorbachev's life and career.

Selected Publications

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era ( New York : W.W. Norton, March 2003).
Translated into Russian, Spanish, Latvian, Chinese, Polish, Czech, Lithuanian, Estonian, Swedish

Co-editor (with Sergei Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason), Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Editor and translator, Khrushchev on Khrushchev, by Sergei N. Khrushchev (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).

Moscow Spring, written with Jane Taubman (New York: Summit Books, 1989).

Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to Detente to Cold War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982).

Governing Soviet Cities: Bureaucratic Politics and Urban Development in the USSR (New York: Praeger, 1973)

Editor, Globalism and Its Critics: The American Foreign Policy Debate of the 1960's (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1973)

The View from Lenin Hills: Soviet Youth in Ferment (New York: Coward-McCann, 1967)

Links

Publishers Weekly (2/17/03)

The Economist (5/10/03)

"How A Speech Won the Cold War" (Op-ed, NYT, 2/25/06)

Richard Pipes's review of Khrushchev (NYT 3/26/03)

Leon Aron's review of Khrushchev (NYT 3/16/03)

Robert G. Kaiser's review of Khrushchev (WaPo, 3/9/03)

Strobe Talbot's review of Khrushchev (LAT, 3/9/03)

Robert Legvold's review of Khrushchev (Foreign Affairs, May/June 03)

Kathleen E. Smith's (87) review of Khrushchev (Amherst, Spring 03)

 

See also: Awards and Honors , Research Interests , and Scholarly and Professional Activities

Tags:  william taubman