Professor Anthony Heywood

Research Overview

Professor Heywood’s research interests lie mainly in Russian and Soviet history from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. His particular interests are the Russian/Soviet railway system and Russia’s participation in the First World War. He is also interested in inter-Allied relations with special reference to Russia’s foreign procurement policy.

His most recent monograph is a biography of the Russian railway engineer Iurii V. Lomonosov (1876-1952), published with Ashgate (2011). For full details see: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754655398

At present he is working on a major reassessment of the tsarist regime's war effort during 1914-17, focusing on the importance of logistics. This project was started with a 10-week research trip to St Petersburg in autumn 2010 funded by the British Academy and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since then, funding from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Santander and the University has helped to cover the costs of archive and library research in St Petersburg and Moscow for typically a month each year during 2011-2019. Colleagues at the European University in St Petersburg and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow have been hugely helpful with the organisation of these trips.

Professor Heywood is also co-organising (with Professor John W. Steinberg of Austin Peay State University and Professor David McDonald of the University of Wisconsin at Madison) an international collaborative project to mark the centenary of Russia's participation in World War I and the Russian revolutions. Entitled 'Russia's Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922: The Centennial Reappraisal', this project was launched formally in Aberdeen in July 2008 with a symposium funded by the British Academy, the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and the University of Aberdeen. A public call for contributions was issued in 2008, with a deadline of February 2012 for submission of draft chapters. The project's books (21 books in 11 volumes) are being published by Slavica Press, with 19 books in print by October 2022. See:

https://slavica.indiana.edu/series/Russia_Great_War_Series

Principal publications (books and edited books):

Russia's Great War and Revolution 1914-1922 , vols 1-4, 5 (books 1-3), 6-10 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica 2014- ) (vol. 11 and vol. 5 book 4 forthcoming 2022-23)

Engineer of Revolutionary Russia: Iurii V. Lomonosov (1876-1952) and the Railways  (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011)

(co-edited with Jon Smele)  The Russian Revolution of 1905: Centenary Perspectives  (London: Routledge, 2005)

Catalogue of the I.A. Bunin, V.N. Bunina, L.F. Zurov and E.M. Lopatina Collections (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 2000)

Modernising Lenin's Russia: Economic Reconstruction, Foreign Trade and the Railways  (Cambridge: CUP, 1999)

(with I.D.C. Button)  Soviet Locomotive Types: The Union Legacy  (Malmo: Stenvall, 1995)

Collaborations

1.  Russia's Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922: The Centennial Reappraisal (with Professor John W. Steinberg, Georgia Southern University, and Professor David McDonald, University of Wisconsin at Madison)

This project was launched formally with a symposium at Aberdeen in July 2008. Funding has been secured from the British Academy, the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, the University of Aberdeen, the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A public call for contributions was issued in July 2009. Project roundtable meetings have been held at the annual conferences of the ASEEES (formerly AAASS), Study Group on the Russian Revolution and BASEES, and project editorial meetings have been held in 2009 (Madison, WN) and 2010 (Uppsala, Sweden). A full board meeting to review the submitted chapters was held at Madison in July 2012. The first books were published in 2014, and the last of the 21 planned books is scheduled for publication in 2022/23. 

2. Britain's railways in the First World War

Professor Heywood currently holds an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award for a PhD project jointly supervised with the National Railway Museum about Britain's railways in the First World War. Dr Ben Marsden acts as second supervisor at Aberdeen, and Dr Oliver Betts is the lead supervisor at the National Railway Museum. The dissertation is scheduled for submission by spring 2023.

3.  Digitisation of the Lomonossoff collection of photographic negatives

The Lomonossoff collection at the Leeds Russian Archive, University of Leeds, includes about 6,000 photographic negatives. Approximately 2,000 of these pictures were taken in Russia during 1902-15; the remainder were taken in Soviet Russia, Western Europe and North America between 1917 and about 1950. This project aims to make these images available for public use by identifying, sorting and digitising them. This technical work was funded by a private donor who wishes to remain anonymous, but whose support is gratefully acknowledged here. The negatives were sorted into a logical sequence for copying, and have been digitised. Work is on-going to identify the several hundred as yet unidentified images.

Funding and Grants

Professor Heywood currently holds an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award for a PhD project jointly supervised with the National Railway Museum about Britain's railways in the First World War.

Teaching Responsibilities

• HI-1022 Europe in the 20th Century
• HI-2520 Global Empires in the Long Nineteenth Century
• HI-303T/353T Imperial Russia, 1801-1914
• HI-304T World War One: International Perspectives
• HI-4012 Britain and Revolutionary Russia, 1917-1924
• HI-4512 Dissertation (supervision)
• HI-5915 Masters Dissertation (course coordinator; supervision)

Non-course Teaching Responsibilities

Personal Tutor