Expert on Soviet Gulag to Lecture March 6

CHESTERTOWN, MD—An expert on the Soviet prison camp system known as the Gulag will deliver the annual Conrad M. Wingate Memorial Lecture at Washington College on Tuesday, March 6.

Steven A. Barnes, associate professor of history at George Mason University, will lecture on “Understanding the Soviet Gulag in Light of the Nazi Concentration Camps,” at 4:30 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall of Toll Science Center.

Barnes is the author of Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton University Press, 2011), which won the 2011 Baker-Burton Award for European history. In that book, Barnes draws from newly opened Russian archives and prisoner memoirs to offer a new interpretation of the true role of the Gulag in Soviet society. His digital project exploring the same topic, Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives (http://gulaghistory.org), received a National Endowment for the Humanities’ Special Projects Implementation Grant.(http://gulaghistory.org), received a National Endowment for the Humanities’ Special Projects Implementation Grant.

The Conrad M. Wingate Memorial Lecture in History was established in honor of the late Conrad Meade Wingate, a member of the Washington College Class of 1923, by his brother Philip J. Wingate ’33 and sister Carolyn Wingate Todd. The March 6 talk is free and open to the public.