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American academic and eugenicist (1941–2015) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Glad (December 31, 1941 – December 4, 2015)[1][2] was an American academic who specialized in the literature and politics of exile, especially Russian literature. He also wrote about, and advocated for, eugenics.[1]
John Glad was born in Gary, Indiana in a family of immigrants from Croatia. His surname in Croatian means "hunger". "I am Ivan Hunger", he used to tell his Russian colleagues.[3]
At age of 17 he began studying Russian[4] and spoke it fluently, which undoubtedly contributed to his marriage to Larisa, nee Romanova, whom he brought from Saratov. He was known as a very good interpreter, and as such he was invited to interpret speeches of high-ranking people from Russia, including Mikhail Gorbachev.[5]
Glad received his MA from Indiana University in 1964 for his thesis "Constance Garnett and David Magarshack as translators of Crime and punishment.",[6] and his Ph.D. degree from New York University in 1970 for his thesis "Russian Soviet science fiction and related critical activity".[7]
Glad was a professor of Russian studies at the University of Maryland, and had previously taught at Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Iowa.[citation needed] He was also the Director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, D.C. (1982–1983),[8] and a Guggenheim Grant recipient (1981).[9] He had written for The Jewish Press, Mankind Quarterly[10] and was interviewed for white nationalist publication The Occidental Quarterly.[11] He was the translator from the Russian of The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland During the War of 1941-1945., edited by Ilya Erenburg, and Vasily Grossman.[12]
Glad wrote two books on the subject of eugenics. Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century advanced humanistic arguments in favour of universal eugenics and has been translated into twelve languages.[4] His second book on the subject, Jewish Eugenics (2011) traced the interactions between Jewish thinkers and activists and eugenics.