March 25, 2006  Abbott (Tom) Gleason, a Watson Institute senior fellow and its former director for University relations and special projects, was feted during a conference titled "Place, Space, and Power in Modern Russian History," held on march 24 and 25 at the Watson Institute.

Gleason, who retired from Brown University in May 2005, is the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History Emeritus. He is known as one of this country's premier historians of the former Soviet Union and modern Russia and an expert on totalitarianism. Three of his former students organized the event: Mark Bassin of University College London, Christopher Ely of Florida Atlantic University, and Melissa Stockdale of the University of Oklahoma.

Conference Schedule for March 24
Conference Shcedule for March 25

While organizing the event, Bassin, Ely, and Stockdale sought to construct a program  that honored Gleason's major contributions to the field of Russian/Soviet history as well as his eclectic interests in art history and concepts of space. Thus, they devised the conference around the following themes:

• spaces of empire and homeland
• the city as locus of identity
• power and the spaces of culture
• the politics of circulation: roads and communication networks
• geographies and cartographies of nationhood

Gleason has a long history with the Watson Institute, primarily serving as the director for University relations and special projects from 2000 to 2003. In the fall of 2003, he was named an Institute senior fellow. As University relations director, Gleason oversaw the Institute's academic affairs and worked to build strong relationships with other University offices. In addition, he first served as its associate director during the mid-1980s and was director during 1999 to 2000, while current director, Thomas J. Biersteker, was on sabbatical. Gleason has been a Watson Institute faculty associate and a member of the Faculty Executive Committee and the Appointments, Reappointments, and Promotions Committee.

A Brown professor for over 30 years, Gleason is the former chair of the History Department and a former director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Wilson Center, Washington, D.C. He is perhaps best known for his work Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (1995). More recently, he co-edited with Martha Nussbaum Nineteen Eighty-Four: George Orwell and Our Future (2005) and Nikita Khrushchev, with Sergei Khrushchev and William Taubman (2000). And, he wrote articles on three Soviet modern artists of the 1920s for the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, and an essay on Hannah Arendt and Communism for the Dizionario del Communismo. Currently, he is completing articles on the history of anti-Communism and on Totalitarianism for the same volume. Starting in the fall of 2004, he began to teach with Vladimir Golstein of Brown's Slavic Department a new course on the "History of Modern Russian Culture."