I arrived at Trinity in October 2021 after spending ten years at Christ Church, Oxford, three years at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, and twenty-five years at New College, Oxford.

I am grateful for and delighted by the warm welcome in Cambridge and the chance to spend a few years working on an ambitious book project about historical film in the USSR between the death of Stalin and the transformation of the former transnational Union into fifteen successor states. I have visited eleven of these to work in archives, and just as interesting has been the chance to see with my own eyes the landscapes and buildings that appeared on screen, to consult private collections, to meet new friends, with some of whom I have developed collaborations, and to visit local markets.

The opportunities in Cambridge itself in terms of library resources and contact with others working on Russia, East Europe, and Eurasia have also been immensely beneficial to my work.

I work on the culture and society of the Russian Empire and the USSR. Among my books are a pioneering history of Russian women’s writing, a survey of Russian behaviour literature (e.g. self-help manuals) as a conduit of information about the West, a study of the legendary Pavlik Morozov (1918-1932), a boy hero who allegedly denounced his father to the authorities, an analysis of local memory in Leningrad and St Petersburg, from kitchens and cafes to ports, stations, shops, workplaces, dachas and cemeteries, an analysis of the treatment of church architecture in Petrograd and Leningrad during the Soviet period, and a history of Lenfilm, the Leningrad feature film studio, in the late Soviet period, focusing particularly on young directors and on the practicalities of film production. For a fuller research outline, please see my profile at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics.