Posted on Monday, January 2, 2006
Dr. Russell Martin, Westminster College associate professor of history, recently earned the McCandless Scholar Award.
The McCandless Scholar Award was designed to honor the memory of Professor J. Bardarah McCandless, who was professor of religion from 1961-1994, and to encourage scholarly activity on Westminster's campus. It is given to one full-time tenure-track faculty member holding the rank of assistant, associate, or full professor. The McCandless Scholar will receive eight semester hours of reassigned time and monetary support of up to $3,000 for research and scholarship expenses.
"Scholarship requires time and it requires the support of all the people around you - your family, your colleagues, and your institution." Martin said. "I'm grateful to Westminster for its unstinting support of my research over the years. The McCandless was only one of the several awards and grants the College has generously given me to do my work. With the McCandless, I was able to fund an entire semester off teaching to produce several works of original scholarship, including two that came out this year and two others that will appear shortly.
"The first of these is a descriptive inventory of manuscripts, including all originals and early copies, documenting Muscovite royal weddings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The manuscripts are in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts in Moscow, and are priceless monuments of early Russian history to which the staff of the archive gave me unrestricted access. I'm especially proud of this publication since it allowed me to use some skills I acquired at length in paleography, textology, and textual criticism. The archive wants a copy of the publication, and I'm very pleased to be able to send one to them. And I'm very pleased to be able to point to the acknowledgments on page one of the text that offers appropriate thanks to the College and to the McCandless family for their generous gift to the faculty. The article appears in the journal Manuscripta.
"The second publication revisits the work of my dissertation advisor from years ago, who introduced a very exciting but controversial new perspective on political culture in Pre-Petrine Russia. This new perspective emphasizes kinship and marriage over class conflict in explaining how early Russian politics at the court of the tsars worked. This piece attempts to validate this new perspective by using new sources - specifically, Russian Orthodox Church documents for the commemoration of the dead. In a sense, I get to tell my colleagues in my field how right my old dissertation advisor really is! This piece appears in Canadian Slavonic Papers.
"Without the support of the McCandless Scholar Award, I cringe to think when I could have managed to get these pieces into print. The support of the grant, and the flexible way the College let me use the funds to create for myself time and space to work, allowed me to do what so many of my other colleagues do all the time: Showcase to a broad audience how Westminster College is a place where cutting-edge research abides harmoniously with quality teaching."
Martin appeared on A&E Biography in a broadcast on Ivan the Terrible as an expert on the controversial ruler. He is the co-founder of the Muscovite Biographical Database, a Russian-American computerized register based in Moscow of early modern Russian notables. The Neville Island, Pa., native is not only fluent in Russian, but also reads Old Church Slavonic/Russian, French, German, Latin, and Polish.
Martin, who has been with Westminster College since 1996, earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and his master's and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Contact at Martin at (724) 946-6254 or e-mail martinre@westminster.edu for more information.
