Alexander Vucinich


Alexander S. Vucinich was an American historian. He taught at the department of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania from 1976 until his retirement in 1985. He also taught at San Jose State College, the University of Illinois, and the University of Texas. After his retirement he and his wife Dorothy moved to Berkeley, California, where he participated in the activities of Berkeley's Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. His field of research was the history of science and social thought in Russia and the Soviet Union.
Alexander Vucinich had a brother, Wayne S. Vucinich, who was a professor of Eastern European studies at Stanford University.

Life

Vucinich was born in 1914 in the United States to a family of Serb immigrants who had come from Bosnia several years before his birth. When he was three years old, both of his parents died in the 1918 flu pandemic, after which he and two older siblings went to live with an uncle in Herzegovina. Vucinich graduated from the University of Belgrade in 1938, then returned to the United States, where he earned an M.A. in 1941 at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1950 from Columbia University in New York City.

Scholarly legacy

According to Alfred Rieber,
Loren Graham wrote that
The "Alexander Vucinich Papers 1961-1984" are housed in the University Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

Selected works