Dr. Alan Holiman is Professor and Chair of Political Science at William Jewell College. He received his B.A.  in Political Science from the University of Arkansas, an M.A. degree in Political Science from The Ohio State University, an M.A. degree in Russian and East European Studies and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Kansas. His special interests include comparative politics (Russia and other post-communist states). Dr. Holiman is former director of the Summer Institute on Russian Politics at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, sponsored by the American Councils for International Education. He is currently at work on a book, titled “Terrorism, the State, and Civil Society: The Human Face of Political Violence in Putin’s Russia.”

 

 

 

A specialist in the interdisciplinary history of Russian technology, science, culture, and the arts, Prof. Palmer earned his B.A. in History and Slavic Languages & Literatures from the University of Kansas and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2006), co-editor of Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine in Russia’s Great War and Revolution (Slavica Publishers, 2022) and How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to the Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline (Mavs Open Press, 2022), and editor of the forthcoming collection Flight Culture and the Human Experience (Texas A&M University Press, 2025). His current book-length project, How Russia was Made: Technology and Culture from the Icon to the iMac, examines the foreign origins and domestic transformation of major technological systems from the founding of the Kievan state through the opening decades of the twenty-first century. He is the founder, President and CEO of SPOKE Educational Network, Inc. (SPOKE-Network™) which serves as home to “Stalinism: Culture and Civilization.”