Faculty

Golfo Alexopoulos

Professor and Director of the USF Institute for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies

Contact

Home Campus: Tampa
Office: SOC 369
Email

Office Hours: By appointment

Education

Ph.D., University of Chicago
M.A., Yale University

Teaching

I teach courses related to Russian/Soviet politics and history, authoritarianism, and international organizations. I often incorporate events and guest lectures into my classes, which I am able to organize as Director of USF鈥檚 Institute for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies (IREES). I received my academic training in the 1990s when newly declassified Russian and Soviet archives became available to researchers. Over the years, I traveled extensively to Russia and the Soviet Union (first in 1986) and share my experiences as a student and researcher in the Soviet Union and Russia under Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. I have been teaching at USF for 30 years, and my students have pursued careers in various fields, including law, diplomacy, business, education, and national security.

Research

My current work examines the threads that connect twentieth-century Soviet and twenty-first-century Russian authoritarianism, with a focus on political violence and disinformation.

My research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, the Minerva Research Initiative, the Office of Naval Research, Fulbright-Hays, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), among others.

I have authored two books and over twenty academic articles and essays, in addition to editing/co-editing two volumes. My publications are available through:

ORCiD:

Web of Science Researcher ID: PCS-5160-2025

My second book, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin鈥檚 Gulag, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. The work examines the system of violent human exploitation in the Stalinist forced labor camps, 1929-1953. It draws upon declassified archival materials from the Gulag health department to reveal how prisoners were fundamentally dehumanized and managed as commodities. Mortality was much greater than the official Soviet records indicate, as prisoners were routinely released on the verge of death. The book argues that human exploitation in the Stalinist camps was deliberately destructive and that the regime concealed the Gulag鈥檚 destructive capacity.

My first book, Stalin鈥檚 Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Cornell, 2003), examines Stalinist policy against the disenfranchised (lishentsy). At the center of the work is an analysis of over five hundred petitions to Soviet officials for the reinstatement of rights. I discovered these handwritten letters from social outcasts in a closed archive in western Siberia just months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The book demonstrates how, from Kremlin leaders to marked aliens, many engaged in identifying citizens and non-citizens and challenging the terms of social membership in the new Soviet state.

Specialty Areas

Russia and the Soviet Union; Stalinism and its legacies; authoritarianism in comparative perspective; labor camps and political violence; propaganda and influence operations.