Andrew Jenks

Andrew Jenks received his PhD in Russian history from Stanford University in 2002. He is a professor of history at California State University, Long Beach. Before jumping on the academic tenure treadmill, he worked in the 1980s on Russian fishing boats in the Bering Sea and studied Russian at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. Through the first half of the 1990s he worked as a journalist for local newspapers in Central Pennsylvania and then as a business and technology-industry journalist in Washington, D.C. He is the author of dozens of academic articles and four books: Russia in a Box: Art and Identity in an Age of Revolution, The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin, Perils of Progress: Environmental Disasters in the Twentieth Century, and, most recently, Collaboration in Space and the Search for Peace on Earth, out this November with Anthem Press. He is now working on a new book, Los Rusos en Mexico, which examines the untold story of Russian immigrants to Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, a colorful cast of spies, economic and political refugees, Trotskyites, Stalinists, and religious sectarians known as “Milkers” (because they drank milk during Lent). He is also editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History.

Ten Things I Can’t Do Without

1. Mangos
2. Plumbing
3. Electricity
4. Peanuts (unshelled, salted, and roasted)
5. My beautiful wife
6. My students, but in a real classroom and not through Zoom
7. My colleagues
8. My friends
9. Books
10. Dusty documents from archives