​David Shearer specializes in Soviet and twentieth-century European history. He received his B.A. from Ohio State University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. His publications include Industry, State, and Society in Stalin’s Russia, 1926-1934 (Cornell University Press, 1996/1997), Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953 (Yale University Press, 2009), and articles on Soviet historiography and social history of the 1920s and 1930s. He is currently compiling and editing a collection of Soviet political police documents from the 1930s, and he is working on a new monograph length research project: the history of Russian and Soviet exploration in Central Asia. More generally, Professor Shearer has an interest in the changing notions of modernity. In addition to other courses, he leads a graduate seminar on this topic.