Brendan McElmeel was a 2017-2018 Mellon Collaborative Fellow for Reaching New Publics and a 2022-2023 Society of Scholars Summer Dissertation Fellow. 

He is a doctoral candidate in History who focuses on the social and cultural history of the Soviet Union and the transnational histories of gender and sexuality in the 20th Century. He is particularly interested in the intersection of social history and the history of ideas, how historically varying ideas and ideologies affect (and are affected by) those parts of the human experience that are often taken for granted as timeless or apolitical, such as sexuality, love, gender identity, and everyday life.

A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award supported research for Brendan's Society of Scholars project in Yekaterinburg, Petersburg, and Moscow in 2019-2020. A paper inspired by the Yekaterinburg material was presented at the Men and Masculinities under Socialism Conference at the University of Bern in 2020 and resulted in the article, "From Don Juan to Comrade Ivan: Educating the Young Men of the Urals for Love and Marriage" (2021).