On view at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library | October 5 – December 8, 2017
Abbott Gleason, known as “Tom” to family, friends and colleagues, came to Brown University in 1968 as an assistant professor of Russian history. His courses were popular, his scholarly work respected, and in due time he became a full professor. In 1993, he was appointed the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History, a position he held until his retirement in 2004. Tom’s nearly forty years of service to Brown included a long association with the Watson Institute as faculty and administrator, including acting as the Institute’s director, 1999–2000. In the 1970s, Tom also spent nearly three years in Washington, DC, as director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Tom’s main areas of academic interest were national identity in Russia/Soviet Union and the United States, 1830 to 1930, and the history of the Cold War. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Young Russia (Viking Press, 1980), Totalitarianism (Oxford University Press, 1995), and a memoir, A Liberal Education (TidePool Press, 2010). He is co-editor with Jack Goldsmith and Martha C. Nussbaum of Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (Princeton University Press, 2005); and with Sergei Khrushchev and William Taubman of Nikita Khrushchev (Yale University Press, 2000).
In 2008, Tom co-curated and wrote the catalogue essay (pdf) for an exhibit of Soviet posters at Brown’s Bell Gallery.
Tom retired from Brown in 2004, due partly to the progression Parkinson’s disease, and he took this opportunity to return to his first love: art and creating pictures. The results of this late prolific artistic output, as well as earlier works dating to his introduction to painting in the 1950s at St. Albans School in Washington, DC, can be seen on this website created by the Brown University Library to accompany his Fall 2017 exhibit.