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High and low
History's James Andrews goes underground for his next research project.
- In successive years, the preeminent science fiction writer Jules Verne wrote on a journey to the center of the earth and then about a trip from the earth to the moon.
James Andrews, associate professor of history, is taking a similar journey. With the publication next year of his book, Red Cosmos, Andrews has written a cultural biography of the "grandfather of Russian rocketry," K.E. Tsiolkovskii. Tsiolkovskii first conceived multi-stage rockets that were later adapted for the U.S. and Soviet space programs.
For a follow-up Andrews has decided to spurn the heights of man's space achievements for a look at the Russian underground - the building of the Moscow Metro.
Andrews says don't be too quick to assume that the two Soviet programs have little in common. In fact, he says for a professor interested in history and technology, this is a natural follow-up piece.
"I like to pick projects that have multidisciplinary aspects to them," he says. "In my case, I'm interested in the political and cultural aspects as well as the technological and scientific background of a project.
"These three things intersect quite often as they do in both the Soviet space program and the building of the Moscow Metro."
K.E. Tsiolkovskii, the subject of Red Cosmos, was much more than a rocket inventor. Andrews says he was a "science popularizer, novelist, technical inventor and ultimately a visionary. His science fiction writings included futuristic drawings of space stations."
Andrews recently returned from Japan where he gave several research and public talks on his research on Tsiolkovskii and Soviet popular culture and space exploration including his new co-edited volume Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture in Post-Stalinist Russia. One of his stops on his Japanese tour was at the Sapporo EurAsian Studies Center at the University of Hokkaido.
This is one of Japan's most prestigious area-studies institutes where Japanese scholars study a variety of peripheral new republican governmental structures, cultures and languages of the former Soviet Union.
The university has invited Andrews back as a visiting professor to both help the school develop a graduate curriculum in international/Slavic studies, and also to serve as a research professor as he writes his book on the Moscow Metro.
The Metro is well known for the ornate design of many of its stations, which contain examples of socialist realist art.
"The Moscow Metro is an engineering marvel, but it has all of these visual elements," Andrews says. "Like the Soviet space program, it's an example of how technical history and cultural history have intersected."
While there are numerous photo or coffee table publications on the Moscow Metro, Andrews' will be the first of its kind that looks at building of the structure.
"No one has captured the project as a monograph before," Andrews says, "and I think there are very few scholars that understand not only the technical aspects of the project, but the political and cultural ones as well.
"What keeps me going on these projects is the ability to speak to a variety of audiences."
Andrews plans to return to Russia in the near future to work on the book project. There he will look at Communist Party archives and architectural archives.
He already knows that a number of key party figures worked on the building process in the 1930s including Nikita Khrushchev.
James Andrews
Around LAS
April 28 to May 11, 2008
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