James T. Andrews is professor of modern Russian and comparative Eurasian history at Iowa State University, where he has recently been the director of the University Center in the Arts and Humanities (2010-2014) and holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry (Texas A&M University Press, 2009) and Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917-34 (Texas A&M University Press, 2003). He is also the editor of Maksim Gor’kii, Science, and Revolution, a special edition of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Review (1995), and coeditor of Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

He served as senior faculty facilitator in 2001 for an IDRF workshop at the Council and has taught as a visiting professor at several research universities including the University of Texas at Austin. His various research awards include Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Fulbright-Hays, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Grants. A recipient of numerous distinguished teaching awards on campus, he was short-listed for the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Award for national distinction in teaching. He has been affiliated since 1995 as a senior scholar at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for the History of the Natural Sciences & Technology in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. His newest archival-based book in progress is a cultural and political history of the Moscow Metro and mass mobility in the capital (from 1902 to the present) entitled Iconic Metropolitan: Mass Culture, Architectural Visions, and the Politics of Public Space in Modern Russia.