Faculty Profiles

Garret McDonald

Visiting Assistant Professor of History
History
231 Spes Unica Hall

Education 

  • PhD, Fordham University
  • MA, Texas Tech University
  • BA, Angelo State University

Areas of Expertise 

  • Imperial Russian and Soviet History
  • Modern European History
  • History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
  • Crime and Punishment in Eurasian History
  • Central Asian History

Research Interests 

  • Forensic psychiatry and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization
  • Soviet prisons and labor camps
  • Criminalistics (forensics) and ethnic policing
  • Natural sciences and  colonialism
  • Sovietization in Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Courses Recently Taught 

HIST 103: World History to 1500
HIST 103W: World Civilization to 1500

Professional Experience 

Teaching Fellow, Fordham University, 2019-2021

Creative and Scholarly Work 

  • The Ghost of the Insulin Gulag: Punitive Psychiatry and Social Repression in the Soviet Union (Book manuscript in-progress)
  • “Journeys through the Past and to the Future: V. A. Obruchev and Popular Enlightenment in the Natural Sciences, 1886–1956,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review (2023): 1-25. https://doi.org/10.30965/18763324-bja10078.
  • "Thinking Cosmically: An Interview with Andy Bruno," Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (forthcoming).
  • "'Knowledgeable and Interested in Penitentiary Issues': The Forensic Psychiatrist in Revolutionary Russia," Journal of the History of Ideas Blog (July 10, 2023). https://jhiblog.org/2023/07/10/knowledgeable-and-interested-in-penitentiary-issues-the-forensic-psychiatrist-in-revolutionary-russia/
  • "Marxism, Psychology, and the Soviet Mind," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 23, no. 1 (Winter 2022): 145-58.
  • Book reviewer for Europe-Asia Studies; Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society; and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History