My name is James Nealy. I attended Duke University as a graduate student in the history department between 2014 and 2022. I write today to honor and recognize the contribution of Dr. Ernest “Erik” Zitser, the Slavic librarian at Duke, to my success and intellectual development.
Erik was one of the first people I met at Duke when I attended the history department’s recruitment weekend (held for students accepted to Duke’s rigorous and selective PhD program in history) in February of 2014. I was immediately struck by Erik’s kindness and the enthusiasm he has for his profession; it was very clear to me that Dr. Zitser takes seriously his role as a steward of Slavic, Eurasian and East European culture. Subject librarians — those who possess a specific expertise in a particular field — are crucial to the success of graduate students. This is certainly the case for those of us who conduct research in the Foreign Service Institute designated “Category IV” (that is, classified as “hard” for native English speakers) languages such as Russian. Ultimately, I accepted Duke’s offer — one of several I received — in part because I knew that I could rely on Dr. Zitser for support.
He did not disappoint. Thanks to the work of Dr. Zitser, virtually every major Soviet publication — including relatively obscure ones — needed to conduct original research was available to me either at the press of a button, for digitized sources, or a simple request, for bound collections. By 2017, I thought I had found a dissertation topic: the history of Soviet sociology. Erik patiently helped me to locate key materials that would later serve as the basis of my first peer-reviewed publication, which appeared in the Winter 2022 edition of Kritika: explorations in Russian and Eurasian history, one of the top journals in the field…