David Ransel, former professor of his tory at the University of Illinois and editor of the Slavic Review, has been appointed editor of the American Historical Review. He assumes his duties at Bloomington this month.
David Ransel succeeds Otto Pflanze, who has served as editor of the Review since January 1977. Returning to teaching at Indiana University full time, Otto Pflanze will be missed by AHA staff and members, but he will still be seen frequenting our annual meetings and other events.
Having received his PhD in Russian history at Yale University, David Ransel has taught in Sweden, at Yale, and at the University of Illinois since 1967. He has also been the editor of the Slavic Review for the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies since 1980.
With several books to his credit—The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (Yale University Press) and The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research (University of Illinois Press)—David Ransel has also published many articles and book reviews. Most recently he is working on a book on Child Abandonment in Russia, with eight of ten chapters completed, and a short monograph: Comparison of childhood mortality and morbidity in relation to child care cultures among Russians, Tatars, Votiaks, and Jews in prerevolutionary Russia. David Ransel speaks five foreign languages and has been the recipient of numerous scholar ships and awards including a Fulbright fellowship, Danforth fellowship, Woodrow Wilson fellowship, and an ACLS grant-in-aid.
We look forward to our tenure with David Ransel and welcome him aboard.
Other changes have occurred on the editorial staff of the Review during the last year. Assistant editor Anne Lee Bain left the staff in early 1984 and was replaced by Michelle Mannering. Robert Bieder, assistant editor for book reviews, left the Review in September 1984, and his replacement is Sarah Kent. Both Mannering and Kent are advanced graduate students in the PhD program at Indiana University.
Michelle Mannering is a magna cum laude graduate of North Texas State University. Her interests lie in the field of United States history since 1865, particularly in American diplomatic history and American relations with the Near East. She reads French, Spanish, and Arabic and has spent a year abroad on research grants in England and Egypt. In 1982 she held a research grant from the Harry S. Truman Library.
Sarah Kent graduated summa cum laude from Connecticut College and at tended summer sessions at Middlebury College, Exeter College at Oxford, and the Goethe Institute at Lüneburg, Germany. Her linguistic qualifications are Serbo-Croatian, German, French, and Russian. At Indiana she has specialized in the field of Eastern Europe, and her dissertation research has taken her to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, where she held a Fulbright Grant from 1982 to 1984.
Earlier both women served the Review as editorial assistants. Michelle Mannering’s chief responsibility is the article section, while Sarah Kent administers the book review section. The two assistant editors are the only full-time editors on the staff of the Review, since the editor and associate editor teach at Indiana University. Editorial assistants spend only twenty hours weekly on the journal. Hence, the assistant editors are the principal support of the two senior editors, and the success of the journal is in no small degree dependent on their mastery of the publication of five issues and 1,800 pages yearly.
