Biography

Erica Fraser
Department: History & Historic Preservation
Title: Assistant Professor
Degree: B.A. (Honours), University of Calgary; M.A., University of British Columbia; Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2009)
Phone: 410.337.3010
Email: erica.fraser@goucher.edu
Website: http://www.goucher.edu/efraser

Professor Fraser primarily teaches Russian history, as well as European, gender, and Jewish history. Her research focuses on gender, the military, and political culture in the Soviet Union during World War II and the Cold War era. Her doctoral dissertation, "Masculinities in the Motherland: Gender and Authority in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, 1945-1968" examined the postwar military, nuclear science research centers, and the space program as sites of masculine anxieties that drove both international developments and domestic Soviet culture during the Cold War. She is currently working on a book manuscript from this research, as well as an article entitled, "The Cosmonaut's Wife: Diplomacy and Domesticity in the Soviet Space Program." Her next research project will examine the Soviet Union's secondary national sport (after soccer): hockey. Constructed as a sport of excessive violence and hooliganism at home, hockey also served as a site of Soviet prestige internationally during the Cold War. This project analyzes discourses on violent masculinities, a Nordic form of Soviet nationalism, and the militarized rituals of sport as both a Cold War battlefield and a site of (masculinized) cultural exchange.

In 2009-2010, Professor Fraser is teaching HIS 220 (Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution); HIS 254/JS 257 (The Jews of Russia under the Tsars, Soviets, and in the Post-Soviet Era); HIS 222 (Russia and the Soviet Union in the 20th Century and Beyond); HIS 226 (Women & Gender in Modern European History); and HIS 233 (History of Germany from Unification to Unification).