Liber is a Professor at the Department of History, University of Alabama, Birmingham. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1986. His scholarly interests include Soviet, post-Soviet and East European social history, nationalism and national identity formation, and twentieth-century Ukrainian history. His list of publications includes two monographs: "Alexander Dovzhenko: a Life in Soviet Film" (British Film Institute, 2002) and "Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923-1934" (Cambridge University Press, 1992). While at HURI, Liber will be working on an interpretative and synthetic essay analyzing the Communist Party's and the Soviet Government's policies designed to mobilize and manage the expression of non-Russian identities within the USSR. Building on his first monograph and on reinterpreting the work produced by many scholars over the past fifty years, the project will provide the first substantial synthesis of Soviet nationality policy from 1917 through 1991.

Liber's four-month fellowship will start in February, 2004. It is funded by the Wolodymyr Smigurowskyi endowed gift fund established to promote "good scholarship on Ukraine."