Stephen Kotkin, the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History and a Professor of History and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, will present a public lecture titled "Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment" at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, November 10, in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall, on the Princeton University campus. A book signing of his new book by the same name will immediately follow the talk.

Kotkin established the History department's Global History workshop. He serves on the core editorial committee of the journal, World Politics and  founded and edits a book series on Northeast Asia.  From 2003 until 2007, he was a member and then chair of the editorial board at Princeton University Press.  From 1996 until 2009 he directed Princeton's Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Outside Princeton, he serves as the lead academic consultant in emerging markets for the World Pension Forum, an umbrella organization for institutional investors.  He also works as a consultant, investigator, and strategist for the Open Society Institute (Soros), Ford Foundation, and other agencies in post-Communist higher education.  From 2006 (until taking a break in February 2009) he has been the regular book reviewer for the New York Times Sunday Business section.

His latest book is "Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of Communist Establishments," with a contribution by Jan Gross, the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society at Princeton (Random House, 2009). He is currently writing a book on dictatorship and power entitled "Stalin's World."  He also has a manuscript in draft called "Lost in Siberia: Labyrinths of the Ob River Basin."

His research interests include authoritarianism, geopolitics, global political economy, empire, and modernism in the arts and politics.

This event is sponsored the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs and is free and open to the public.