Faculty Profile
Karl Qualls
Professor of History; W. Gibbs McKenney Chair in International Education (2000)
Contact Information
Denny Hall
717-245-1774
Bio
Karl's teaching interests include Russian and German history, the Holocaust, comparative revolutions (political, social, and cultural), dictators, urban history, refugees, childhood, and more. His new book "Stalin's Ninos: Educating Spanish Civil War Refugee Children in the Soviet Union, 1937-51" (Toronto, 2020) examines refugee children of the Spanish Civil War who were raised in the Soviet Union and the special boarding schools designed for them and the educational methods used to develop the children into Hispano-Soviets. His previous book "From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II" (Cornell, 2009) is now available in a free Ukrainian-language edition at https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9798887196992/. It challenges notions of totalitarianism, investigates the creation of historical myths, and outlines the role of monuments and urban space and identity formation in a city torn between Ukraine and Russia. It further helps us understand why Russians who have occupied the city since 2014 believe that it is a "Russian" city. These and other publication have been supported by grants from the J. Paul Getty Foundation, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Library of Congress, American Council of Learned Societies, National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the International Research and Exchange Board, among others. You can find a review of Stalin's Ninos at https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/127/3/1466/6850944
Education
- B.A., University of Missouri at Columbia, 1993
- Ph.D., Georgetown University, 1998
Awards
- Ganoe Award for Inspirational Teaching, 2003-04