Adele Lindenmeyr, PhD, the inaugural William and Julia Moulden Dean of Villanova University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been researching, writing and publishing on humanitarian topics throughout her career as a historian. With expertise in modern Russia and the revolutionary period, Dean Lindenmeyr’s books and other publications focus on women’s activism, voluntarism, social reform movements and civil society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Dean Lindenmeyr’s decision to take Russian in high school proved to be a fateful one, as she immediately fell in love with the language, literature and culture and took her first trip to the USSR as a junior. She went on to graduate magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Russian language and literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She was fortunate to take several classes on Russian history during her time as an undergraduate and decided to pursue her doctorate in History at Princeton University. The opportunity to study and live in Moscow and Leningrad in the 1970s as a graduate student was a formative experience, influencing Dean Lindenmeyr’s scholarship and teaching while deepening her knowledge of Russian history, culture, and everyday life.

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She has published numerous papers and book chapters in American, European and Russian scholarly outlets. Her research in Russia, the US, and western Europe has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Kennan Institute and the Dmitrii S. Likachev Foundation. Dean Lindenmeyr’s first book, Poverty Is Not A Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton University Press, 1996), explores the development of private charity and public welfare in Russia from the eighteenth century to World War I. Her most recent book, Citizen Countess: Sofia Panina and the Fate of Revolutionary Russia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), is the first biography of one of the most prominent women of late imperial Russia. Dean Lindenmeyr is also the co-editor of five volumes in the series Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922 (Slavica Publishers, 2014 - 2025), presenting new research on Russian history during World War I and the 1917 Revolution.

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Dean Lindenmeyr is also a frequent presenter at national and international conferences, including the annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and she served as president of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

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Dean Lindenmeyr began her tenure at Villanova University in 1987, when she joined the faculty of the History Department. After serving as the chair of the department, and then as the Dean of Graduate Arts and Sciences, she was appointed Dean of the College in 2014.

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She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Philabundance, a nonprofit Philadelphia-based hunger relief organization.

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