Norman Naimark is the Robert and Florence McDonnell Chair in East European History at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution and of the Institute of International Studies, where he was Convener of the “European Forum”. Within the Council for Global Cooperation, he is an Advisory Chair to the vertices of The Cold War Project and Genocide, Holocaust and Disaster Studies.
Naimark was previously a Professor of History at Boston University and Fellow of the Russian Research Center at Harvard. He has served as Director of Stanford’s Center for Russian and East European Studies (1989-95), Chair of its History Department (1995-1998), member of the Faculty Senate and its Steering Committee (2001-4), and Director of Stanford’s interdisciplinary programs in International Relations and International Policy Studies. He presently serves as the Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program.
He serves on the editorial boards of a number of leading journals in the field, including The American Historical Review, The Journal of Modern European History, East European Politics and Societies, and Kritika. He has also served on and chaired the major professional committees that foster research and exchanges with the successor states of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Joint Committee on Eastern Europe, and the International Research and Exchange Corporation (IREX) Program Committee. Naimark was elected to the “Commission Internationale des Etudes Historiques Slaves” and was on the Board and then President (1997-98) of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS).
He is the author and editor of several books, including Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty (Harvard University Press, 2019), Genocide: A World History (Oxford University Press, 2017), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (edited with Ronald Grigor Suny and Fatma Müge Göçek) and Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton University Press, 2010).
In 1995, he received the Richard W. Lyman Award for Outstanding Service to the Stanford Alumni Association. He twice received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (1992, 2003). In 1996, he was awarded the “Distinguished Service Cross” from the government of the Federal Republic of Germany. Naimark received his BA (1966), MA (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees from Stanford University.
