People

Kees (Case) Boterbloem

Professor

Contact information and cv

Office: SOC 211
Phone: 813.974.2807
Fax: 813.974.6228
Email: cboterbl@usf.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Education

Ph.D., McGill University, 1994

Research

I was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1962, where I graduated from high school in 1979. After receiving my first degrees at the University of Amsterdam, I moved to Canada, where I further specialized in Russian and European history. I received my Ph.D. in 1994 from McGill University in Montreal.

I then taught European and World History at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario until 2005. During this time I wrote two books, Life and Death under Stalin: Kalinin Province, 1945-1953, which was based on my dissertation, and The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896-1948. In 2000, I was the recipient of Nipissing's annual prize for most outstanding teacher, and in 2003 I received its Research Achievement Prize.

I also received a doctoral grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, a federal granting agency in Canada, by which same Council in 2004 I was awarded a three-year grant for research that led to my third scholarly monograph, The Fiction and Reality of Jan Struys. My first two books studied the history of the Soviet Union under Stalin, whereas I have since moved to the study of the cultural encounter between Western Europeans and Russians in the Early Modern Age, even if I occasionally publish something on the Soviet Union even now (and on some other topics, too). Read an interview about my third book.

Some of my students have gone on to become professional academics, although many more have become, for example, school teachers, lawyers, stock brokers, or moved up the ranks in the military. I do have to say in all honesty that I can claim only very little credit for the outstanding achievements of all these individuals. Indeed, it is my view that the more you put into your study, the more you get out of it. Even(?) in the Humanities and Social Sciences genuinely learning things requires a lot of hard work. But several of the hard workers that I had the pleasure to supervise in a course or for a thesis at USF have reaped the benefits of their efforts, such as admission to graduate school, and in the case of one, a teaching Fulbright in South-Korea. I teach courses at USF in a number of topics, although I focus primarily on Early Modern Empires and their "motherlands."

I am currently also the coordinator of USF's Russian, East-European and Eurasian Studies Certificate (formerly Russian Studies Certificate), an interdisciplinary diploma, which requires recipients to sample a number of courses on matters affecting the territory of Europe and Asia east of the Elbe river and Adriatic Sea all the way to Sakhalin.

Last but not least, I have been editor of The Historian, the peer-reviewed journal published under the auspices of the national History Honors Society Phi Alpha Theta, since the summer of 2008. As such, I oversee the publication of myriad articles and book reviews on a great variety of topics, from Korean, Afghan and Central-Asian history to the history of Early Modern England and Early America, US labor history and the history of the Cold War.

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