Haimson, Leopold H.

BIOGHIST REQUIRED Leopold Henri Haimson is a historian and professor emeritus of Columbia University, where he worked since 1965 as a professor of Russian history and a member of the Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of Eurasia.

BIOGHIST REQUIRED Haimson was born in Brussels, Belgium on April 28, 1927 in a family of immigrants from Russia. He resided there up to the age of 13, when the German invasion in 1940 prompted his family to escape, first to unoccupied France, and eventually to the United States. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history and philosophy from Harvard University in 1945 and his PhD in history and social relations there in 1952. His professional background includes his work as a research associate at Columbia University (1948-1949, 1950-1952), American Museum of Natural History and Center for International Studies (1948-1949, 1951-1952); a visiting research scholar at Princeton University (1952-1953); a lecturer in the Russian Regional Program and the Department of History at Harvard University (1955-1956); an assistant professor and then a professor of Russian History at University of Chicago (1956-1966). From 1960 to 1965, Leopold Haimson served as the director of the Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement. In 1964-1965, he was a research associate at Hoover Institute and a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. He became a professor in the Department of History and the Russian Institute at Columbia University in 1966

BIOGHIST REQUIRED A distinguishing feature of Haimson's career has been his role as the organizer of collaborative research projects that have brought together scholars from different disciplines and different academic cultures, especially those of the United States, France, and Russia. Starting in 1982, in addition to his work for the Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement, he was a director of the International Project in Comparative Labor History, based at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (Paris), for almost two decades. He also served as co-chairman of the International Commission for Joint Projects in Modern Russian History. Starting in the 1960s, he became involved in Soviet academic life. His efforts to develop contacts between Soviet and American specialists in Russian history resulted in an extensive scholar exchange program between the Soviet Union and the United States. He helped organize a regular series of workshops in the form of international colloquia devoted to discussions of various historical problems in a comparative perspective that brought together American, European, and Russian scholars. He was also a visiting lecturer at Moscow University, at the Institute of History, and at the European University in St. Petersburg.

BIOGHIST REQUIRED Haimson's scholarly interests include political culture, social and quantitative history, the dynamics of strike movements in a comparative perspective, as well as cultural anthropology and the application of its concepts and methodology to studies of the Soviet Union. Since the publication of his influential "The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism" in 1955, Leopold Haimson has published many books and articles and edited volumes on Russian political, social, and intellectual life in late imperial and revolutionary Russia in English, French, and Russian

From the guide to the Leopold Haimson Papers, 1890s-1999, (Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Bakhmeteff Archive)