Donald J. Raleigh is the Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has authored, translated, and edited numerous books on modern Russian history including Revolution on the Volga (1986), Experiencing Russia’s Civil War (2002), Russia’s Sputnik Generation (2006), and Soviet Baby Boomers (2012), a Russian-language edition of which was published in 2015.
The book was short listed for the Pushkin House Prize in Great Britain and won the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies Book Prize. His current research project, a biography of Soviet leader Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, has taken him to archives in Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Raleigh joined the faculty at UNC in 1988. Since then, he has supervised 33 MA theses and 26 PhD dissertations, and has served on dozens of other thesis and dissertation committees. In 2002 he received the Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction; in 2016 the Faculty Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring; and in 2020 the UNC Women’s Leadership Council Graduate Mentoring Award. In the fall of 2021, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies awarded him its Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award.
Don will serve as enrichment lecturer on Cruise the Heart of Europe, May 5 – 20, 2023, with a minimum of 10 UNC travelers.