By 2004, Ethan Pollock had already spent a long time with his research topic. He'd discovered it in the mid-1990s, while in Russia working on a documentary film about nuclear science in the Soviet Union. Then, at Berkeley, it had become his dissertation topic. Now, as a junior faculty member at Maxwell, Pollock was recrafting the dissertation into a more broadly focused book-length manuscript.

Pollock studies how the support of science and the publication of its discoveries operated in the Soviet Union. Particularly, he's documented how Joseph Stalin influenced science to assure that its discoveries supported Communist Party dogma. (The field of genetics was outlawed, for example, because Stalin deemed it inconsistent with Marxist-Leninist principles.) To Pollock, this was an object lesson in the ways government, while supporting science, often seeks to control it for the sake of ideology. Analyzing journals and copious government records of the era, he'd already built a substantive account of how Soviet science was forced to conform with political goals.

Then something potentially wonderful happened. The Central Party Archive made Stalin's personal papers available for research. Pollock faced a choice: publish his book as is, or try to get back to Moscow to spend a few weeks with Stalin's papers, possibly evincing another side of the story. It would not be easy--the travel, room and board, clerical costs. Pollock needed help.

So he applied for and received a grant from the Maxwell School's Pigott Fund. "It helped me to put Stalin at the center of this story," Pollock says.

Stalin, it turns out, imagined himself a scholar, and exacted direct control over such fields as philosophy, biology, physiology, and political economy. He often personally edited upcoming journal articles, and twice submitted his own (on linguistics and on political economy).

Pollock's book, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, will be published by Princeton University Press this fall. He thinks it holds lessons for today, as debates evolve over such matters as global warming. "We should be aware of the problems that can occur when states compete with scientists over scientific truth," he says.

The fund that allowed Pollock to finish his book was created by financier W. Terrence Pigott, a 1979 SU alumnus. It is devoted to supporting faculty research and development -- one of only two funds at Maxwell so designated. (The other, the Appleby-Mosher Fund, provides similar support to faculty members across the School.)

Norman Kutcher, chair of history, says that, to date, the Pigott Fund has been given to pre-tenured faculty members, for whom the pressure to complete a first book is great, even while resources are sometimes otherwise limited.

"Every single job candidate," Kutcher says, "asks me about the ongoing availability of research funds. . . .The Pigott Fund means a huge amount as a recruiting tool."

Pollock was one of two historians to complete a manuscript thanks to Pigott funding in 2004. Samantha Kahn Herrick traveled to France to extend her research on medieval hagiographies for a book to be pubished early in 2007 by Harvard University Press.

Hagiographies -- idealized biographies of saints, written by the devoted -- are by far the most numerous forms of written history surviving from medieval times. Yet, as secular history they cannot be taken literally. They were often embellished, sometimes even fabricated, to form a mythology around each saint. Hagiographies defined the role a saint was to play in the everyday lives of medieval Christians (who not only revered their saints, but attributed to them ongoing roles in daily matters, as agents of God).

Still, though, hagiographies can be read and parsed for literal historic content. "A particular text reflects the culture that produced it, even though it was not intended as a historical source." For Herrick, the culture in question is 10th- and 11th-century Normandy.

Much like Pollock, Herrick used the Pigott funding to travel to far-away archives (at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris); she also conducted crucial consultation with historians in Europe. And, as with Pollock, her Pigott research broadened her manuscript, allowing her, in the final chapter, to study hagiographic texts of regions outside Normandy, to see how those "imagined saints" compare with those at the center of her work.

Asked how that culminating chapter might have been different without the six weeks of research that the Pigott Fund provided, Herrick is pithy: "It would have been a lot thinner."

                                                                                     —Dana Cooke