Image: Assistant Professor Joseph (Joey) Kellner has made a number of key accomplishments in 2025, the result of years of scholarship and research. His first book was published in June, and he received the Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award, established by the University of Georgia Research Foundation to recognize outstanding accomplishments and evidence of potential future success in scholarship, creative work or research by an early career faculty member in the arts and humanities. Kellner is gratified for the departmental support he received for the award. The history department has been very active in supporting my research, from helping me seek out and win short-term grants through my nomination for the Early Career Scholar Award. I appreciate in particular how much the department supports faculty in fields that are not a traditional focus of the department. Published through Cornell University Press, his new book The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse (Cornell University Press, 2025) discusses what Kellner calls, the “seeking phenomenon” of the Soviet collapse and transition in the early 1990s. The book is organized into four chapters with a specific belief at the center; the Astrologers, the Hare Krishnas, the apocalyptic, Vessarion sect and the New Chronology of world history created by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. This growth of spiritual beliefs in eclectic and non-traditional beliefs, Kellner argues, is reflective of a large cultural transformation in reckoning with a world with no familiar reference points. The speed at which their lives changed was very rapid so the stars served as both a map and a compass for the disoriented citizens in the 1990s. Kellner was drawn naturally to the study of cultural history and its connections with spirituality, having had a number of friends who had grown up in deeply religious worlds. He felt that the connections between history and spirituality have always existed. He spent the past 15 years off and on writing on this topic, originally in the form of their Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California: Berkeley. He feels fortunate to have had that time and space to finish it, explaining “hopefully the book reflects my absolute hardest effort and best attempt to grapple with the subject.”. After the dissertation he took 2 years completely off while lecturing at Berkeley then looked at it with fresh eyes. He especially loved researching with the Vessarion sect in Siberia, living in people’s houses and doing ethnography. He had a standalone digital camera and would walk around at night in the deep snow to capture scenes. Joey feels fortunate to have spent time in the serene wilds of Russia, but for now, his current research is keeping him closer to home. He explained that “although research in Russia is now impossible on account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has been easy to develop new projects, and UGA has given me the time and space to do that—something necessary for my entire field in this moment, but not always guaranteed.” Currently, Kellner is co-editing a primary source reader on settler-colonialism in the history of the Russian Empire Red Against Empire. The volume translates the work of 1920s Soviet historians who were trying to revise the history of the Russian empire from a nationalist story to one that situates the Russian empire in settler-colonial studies. Many of the writers are executed and their work hidden by Stalin, leaving them forgotten in contemporary Russian studies. The co-edited work includes commentary by current experts on settler-colonial and post-colonial studies. If you want to know more about his current work, you can attend tea chats in the morning in his history office after checking in through the Joey-Matic system. Students and colleagues love the Joey-Matic device located outside Dr. Kellner’s office that will let you know if he’s available to chat, in a meeting, and even if the tea kettle is on! By Erleen Ellis
