My commitment to the study of the Soviet Union was consolidated during a year spent as a student in St Petersburg in the early 1990s. I came to film studies via a circuitous route that involved ‘traditional’ MML language and literature studies (where I was enthused by the relationship between text and image in nineteenth-and-twentieth-century literature and visual art) and an MPhil in Social and Political Theory, which allowed me to explore the interaction between culture, society and ideology. This combination of influences led to work on early Soviet cinema and has continued to inflect my research and teaching.

I began my PhD in Cambridge but spent a large part of it as a Visiting Fellow in Harvard University, and then in Moscow.

Currently, I am the Responsible College Officer for Communications.

In broad terms, my research focuses on the links between the political avant-garde and mainstream cinema, before the Second World War, and their shared project of constructing models of spectatorship that would correspond to new ideals of subjectivity.

I welcome inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to my interests.