Office Phone: 416-978-5020
Office Location: VC 312
E-mail: n.krementsov@utoronto.ca
Office Hours and/or Leave Status: N/A
Degrees: PhD
Nikolai Krementsov research interests are quite diverse, but he works mostly on the history of XXth-century Russian medicine and life sciences (particularly, genetics, evolutionary theory, ethology, physiology and eugenics). His special interest is the history of international relations in science and medicine especially during the interwar and cold war periods. He is now working on a large project, exploring interactions among science, medicine, and literature in Bolshevik Russia (1917–1929), focusing on the development of research in endocrinology, blood transfusions, experimental surgery, anabiosis and telepathy.
Selected Publications
- Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 268 pp.
- (with William deJong-Lambert, eds.) The Lysenko Controversy and the Cold War (special issue of the Journal of the History of Biology, 2012, vol. 45, no. 3).
- “Clinical Collection on Dermatology and Syphilology (1887–90), Nikolai Porfirevich Mansurov,” in Michael Sappol, ed., Hidden Treasures: National Library of Medicine (New York: Blast Books, 2012), pp. 102–106.
- “Biocosmisme,” in Gérard Asoulay and Dominique Pestre, eds., C’est l’espace! (Paris, Gallimard, 2011), pp.59–60.
- (with William deJong-Lambert) “On Labels and Issues: The Lysenko Controversy and the Cold War,” Journal of the History of Biology, 2012, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 373–388.
- A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)
- “From 'Beastly Philosophy' to Medical Genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union,” Annals of Science 2011, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 61–92.
- “Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 413–429.
“Marxism, Darwinism, and Genetics in Soviet Union,” in Denis Alexander and Ron Numbers, eds., Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), pp. 215–246.
“Dialectical materialism and Soviet science in the 1920s and 1930s,” in William Leatherbarrow and Derek Oxford, eds., A History of Russian Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 340–367 (with Daniel P. Todes). - 'Trypanosoma cruzi, cancer and the Cold War,' História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, 2009, vol.16, supl.1, pp. 75–94.
- 'Off with your heads: isolated organs in early Soviet science and fiction,' Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2009, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 87–100.
- 'Hormones and the Bolsheviks: from Organotherapy to Experimental Endocrinology, 1918–1929,' Isis, 2008, vol. 99, no. 3, pp. 486–518.
- ''In the shadow of the bomb': U.S.-Soviet biomedical relations in the early Cold War, 1944–1948,' Journal of Cold War Studies, 2007, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 41–67.
- Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
- The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
- International Science between the World Wars: The Case of Genetics (London: Rutledge, 2005).
- "Eugenics, Rassenhygiene, and Human Genetics in the Late 1930s: The Case of the Seventh International Genetics Congress," in Susan G. Solomon, ed., Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia Between the Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
- "Big Revolution, Little Revolution: Science and Politics in Bolshevik Russia," in Social Research, 2006, Vol. 73, no. 4.