Assistant Professor Steven Seegel

Dr. Seegel joined the faculty at Worcester State College in September 2007.  He received his Ph.D. in Russian and European history from Brown University in 2005, with a specialization in the intellectual and political history of Central/Eastern Europe.  Made possible through four major grants, his revised dissertation, Floating States, examines the institutional purposes of East-Central European map production and dissemination from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles, and the individual lives of cartographers amid changing borders and borderlands.  The book-length manuscript is currently being considered for publication.    

Before coming to WSC, Dr. Seegel taught at the University of Tennessee, and in 2006-7, he was a Eugene and Daymel Shklar Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute.  While there, he was commissioned to write a book-length work, Ukraine under Western Eyes: European Maps of Ukraine from the Renaissance to the 20^th Century, based on the donated map collections of the family of Bohdan Krawciw (1906-75), a prominent Ukrainian-American journalist.  The book, a microhistorical analysis of Ukrainian geopolitics with nearly 100 color maps of Ukraine in nine languages, is to be published by Harvard in March 2008, and will coincide with an exhibition at Pusey Library.  

His specializations include: Intellectual/political history of Russia/USSR and East-Central Europe, Early Modern/Modern Europe, Empires and Nationalism, Borderland Cultures, Historiography.

Dr. Seegel has presented his research in Finland, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.  He is involved with a number of collaborative international research initiatives, including the “Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires since 1848” project, steered by Dr. Omer Bartov at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.  Dr. Seegel is also a contributor to the History of Cartography series <www.geography.wisc.edu/histcart>.  He serves as the principal translator for the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos project at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum <www.ushmm.org/research/center/encyclopedia>.  Dr. Seegel’s newest research project focuses on the business and politics of the private and public institutionalization of on-line genealogy enterprises in the U.S. and Canada, using East-Central Europe as a case study.      

At Worcester State College, Dr. Seegel enjoys working with students from all walks of life, in particular incoming freshmen, first-generation college students, and future teachers in training.  He relishes the bemused seriousness of intellectual pursuits in the classroom, and the challenge of learning – and teaching oneself – how to think and research independently.  Dr. Seegel is a member of the American Historical Association (AHA), the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), and the New England Historical Association (NEHA).

Dr. Seegel’s undergraduate and graduate courses at WSC include the history of early modern and modern Europe; the intellectual and political history of modern Central/Eastern Europe; the history of Russia and the Soviet Union; the history of empires; the history of cartography, and Western Civilization and World Civilizations surveys.