Professor Laura Englestein is Professor Emerita of Russian History at Yale University. Before coming to Yale, Prof. Engelstein held professorial positions at Princeton and Cornell Universities.

 Professor Engelstein is one of the most distinguished historians of Imperial Russia. Her early research focused on the Russian labor movement, the focus of her 1976 Stanford University doctoral dissertation and the highly praised book Moscow 1905: Working Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford UP, 1982).

 Prof. Englestein greatly contributed to our understanding of Russia’s cultural history, especially history of sexuality. In this area she wrote two major monographs and co-edited a collection of essays: Keys to Happiness: Sex and Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Cornell UP, 1992), Castration and the Heavingly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Cornell UP, 1999), and (with Stephanie Sandler) Self and Story in Russian History (Cornell UP, 2000). Prof. Engelstein’s most important articles on Russian history were recently reissued in the book form: Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path (Cornell UP, 2009).