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Prof Simon Dixon
Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History
SSEES
UCL SLASH
- Joined UCL
- 1st Oct 2008
Research summary
Simon Dixon is an historian of imperial Russia interested in politics, culture and society. His first book, The Modernisation of Russia, 1676-1825 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), led to a decade of work on the eighteenth century culminating in Catherine the Great (Profile Books, 2009). More recently, he has returned to work on the Russian Orthodox Church, the subject of his SSEES doctoral thesis, supervised by Geoffrey Hosking. His current research has two main focuses: the history of the Orthodox episcopate, 1880-1914, and a study of religion, culture and diplomacy between Russia and Britain, 1833-1878.
Dixon is Chairman of the Literary Committee of the Russian Booker Prize and of the international Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia. With Mark Mazower (Columbia) and James Retallack (Toronto), he is joint editor of Oxford Studies in Modern European History.
Teaching summary
Dixon welcomes applications from research students interested in all aspects of the history of imperial Russia. Subjects studied by his past and current students include ‘Prize Law in Russia, c. 1760-c. 1830’; ‘Space, Image and Display in Russian Central Asia, 1881-1914’; ‘The Famine in Tambov Province, 1891-1892’; ‘The Russian Image of Constantinople’.
Courses taught
SEHI3009 Monarchs and the Enlightenment in Russia and Central Europe
SEHI6009 The History of Russia, 1598-1856
Education
- University College London
- PhD, History by area | 1993
- University of Cambridge
- MA, History | 1986
- University of Cambridge
- BA, History | 1982
Biography
Simon Dixon read History at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he was a Junior Research Fellow between 1987 and 1990. Following a Lectureship at the University of Glasgow, he became Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds in 1999 and moved to SSEES as Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History in 2008.
