1966–
The Bangladeshi-American historian who founded the modern archival study of the Soviet space program
Even Russian space officials acknowledge Siddiqi as one of the few people worldwide conducting original archival research on the Soviet space program.
Born in Dhaka to an academic family, Siddiqi earned his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon and became the first historian to systematically exploit post-Soviet Russian archives for the study of the Soviet space program, transforming it into a rigorous academic field. His 2000 NASA publication Challenge to Apollo remains the definitive archival history of the Soviet human spaceflight effort; The Wall Street Journal named it one of the five best books on space exploration, and it endures as the standard reference. In The Red Rockets' Glare (2010) he broadened his inquiry into the cultural history of Russian cosmic imagination from the 19th century through Sputnik, and he is now completing a study of the Gulag's intersection with Soviet science and technology as professor of history at Fordham University.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 2000Published Challenge to Apollo with NASA History Office
- 2004Ph.D. in History, Carnegie Mellon University
- 2005–현재Professor of History, Fordham University
- 2010Published The Red Rockets' Glare (Cambridge University Press)
- 2016Guggenheim Fellowship
- 2016–현재Co-editor, Studies in the History of Science and Technology series, Johns Hopkins UP
Related historical events
Series editor of the English edition of Chertok's memoirs
Siddiqi served as series editor of the English-language edition of Boris Chertok's four-volume memoir Rockets and People, which NASA's History Division published between 2005 and 2011 in translated and somewhat edited form. Chertok was a control-systems designer in the Korolev design bureau lineage from 1946, and he wrote the four-volume memoir of the Soviet space industry between 1994 and 1999 with the support of his wife Yekaterina Golubkina; it first appeared in Russian in 1999. By bringing a participant's testimony into print in English with translation and editorial apparatus, the project complemented Siddiqi's own archival work: the recollections of a leading designer who worked under Sergei Korolev became accessible to Anglophone researchers alongside his archival histories.