Barbara Engel (historian)

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Barbara Alpern Engel is an American historian who studies Russia. She was born in New York City on June 28, 1943, and finished Valley Stream Central High School in 1961. She earned a BA in Russian area studies from the City College of New York in 1965 and an MA from Harvard University in 1967. In 1963–64, she was one of five women accepted into Princeton’s Cooperative Program in Critical Languages, becoming the first female undergraduates there. After working as a bilingual secretary and translator at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, she earned a PhD in Russian history from Columbia University in 1975.

Engel began her teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College in 1973 and later joined the University of Colorado, where she spent most of her career and became a full professor. She directed the Central and East European Studies Program from 1993 to 1995 and has served as chair of the History Department.

She has written two monographs, including Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861–1914, and co-edited Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar with Clifford N. Rosenthal (1975), the memoirs of five female revolutionaries of the 1870s.

Engel has received several honors, such as the Chancellor’s Writing Award, the Elizabeth Gee Award for Excellence, the Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Work, and the Mortar Board Senior Honor Society Excellence in Teaching Award.