Russian Cinema Research Centre Group Members

Rosie Bainbridge, Trinity College, Cambridge

Rosie Bainbridge is writing a PhD thesis on the role of intertitles in Soviet cinema during the silent era under the supervision of Dr. Emma Widdis.

Dr Djurdja Bartlett, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London

Dr Bartlett is Reader in Histories and Cultures of Fashion. She has published and lectured widely on the theme of fashion during socialism and post-socialism. She is author of FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism (MIT Press, 2010), in Russian as FashionEast: prizrak brodivshii po vostochnoi Evrope (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011), editor of the volume on East Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus in the Berg Encyclopaedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010) and joint editor, with Shaun Cole and Agnes Rocamora, of Fashion Media: Past and Present, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Dr Bartlett’s monograph Fashion Travels across Europe: The Real and Imaginary Geographies, 1912-2012 (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming in 2016) will be the result of AHRC-funded research that explores previously unrecorded, dress-mediated discourse between East Central European and Russian fashion, and its western counterpart throughout the 20th century to the present day.

Maria Belodubrovskaya, University of Chicago

Maria is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin (Cornell University Press, 2017) and has published articles on Russian film aesthetics, history, and theory in Cinema Journal, Film History, Slavic Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Projections: the Journal of Movies and Mind, and KinoKultura.

Daniel Bird, University of Sheffield

Mr Bird is completing his PhD thesis on the apparent convergence of the thinking of Bakhtin, Eisenstein and Vygotskii on the subject of inner speech and primitive thought during the interwar period. He is investigating the similarities between the three thinkers in terms of both the ideas of their time and the institutional contexts that shaped their work. Prior to his PhD research he worked both as a film writer and as a programmer.

Professor Birgit Beumers, University of Aberystwyth

Birgit Beumers is Professor in Film Studies at the University of Aberystwyth. She completed her DPhil at St Antony's College, Oxford and specialises in cinema in Russia and Central Asia, as well as Russian culture. She is also the editor of the online journal KinoKultura and of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. She is currently working on post-Soviet cinema and on early Soviet animation.

Josephine Burton, Dash Arts

Josephine Burton is Artistic Director of Dash Arts, a cross-artform charity which makes new theatre, music, film, art, events and participation programmes with international artists. Currently Josephine is curating a series of screenings, events and panel discussions that explores the cinematic traditions of the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Space, as part of Dash Arts’ REVOLUTION17 season of work with artists from the post-Soviet states. She is also planning a public programme that marks the centenary of Lenfil´m in 2018 with the Kino Klassika Foundation.

Serian Carlyle, University of Cambridge

Serian is interested in the intersection between sexuality, health and nationalism in film, and the ways in which bodies are used to explore national anxieties. She has co-authored a chapter on the depiction of abortion in Soviet cinema with Dr Rachel Morley (UCL SSEES), forthcoming in 2020 with Palgrave Macmillan. She is currently studying for her Masters in European, Latin American and Comparative Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and working part-time as the Officer for TB Europe Coalition. She previously read Russian Studies at UCL, where she wrote on pregnancy in Russian and Soviet cinema, as well as on the depiction of sex work in post-Soviet Russian film.

Dr Philip Cavendish, UCL SSEES

Dr Cavendish teaches Russian film at both BA and MA level in SSEES. He contributes to the UCL Film Studies MA and the UCL BA course in European Film. 

Clare Challis

Clare Challis was recently awarded an MA in Russian Studies with Distinction at SSEES. An article based on her Masters Dissertation, which examined the use of music in two films by Kira Muratova, has been published in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema (see SRSC, 9, 2015, 1, pp. 40-60). Clare had earlier graduated from Oxford University with an MA in Music and is an active musician. She is continuing her research into the use of music in Soviet and Post-Soviet film.

Professor Ian Christie, Birkbeck College, University of London

Ian Christie teaches film and media history at Birkbeck College, and is a visiting tutor at various other institutions, including the National Film and Television School, Palacky University, Olomouc, Paris III, and Stockholm University. He has been involved with Russian cinema since the 1970s, working on seasons for the National Film Theatre (with John Gillett and Claire Kitson), and co-editing a series of books with Richard Taylor which included The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (1989) and Eisenstein Rediscovered (1993). More recently he curated the exhibition Unexpected Eisenstein (GRAD, 2016) and is working on an exhibition for the Hermitage in St Petersburg centring on Eisenstein for 2017. He has also contributed to the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 (2017) and an anthology of Eisenstein's drawings for Thames & Hudson.

Dr Yuna de Lannoy

Dr de Lannoy completed a thesis which compares Kurosawa and Eisenstein's approaches to Japanese art, Dostoevsky and music in 2009. She has investigated how the objectification of their respective cultures led to the persistent presence of 'otherness' in their cinemas. Among others things, she examined Kurosawa's developing use of Noh as a medium for adapting western plays, and discusses Eisenstein's approach to Central Asia, specifically through an analysis of his unrealized project, Ferghana Canal.

Olenka Dmytryk, University of Cambridge

Olenka Dmytryk is working on the topics of gender, sexuality and senses
in Soviet cinema of the Thaw and beyond. Her MPhil dissertation, also
written at Cambridge, under the supervision of Dr Emma Widdis, explored
heteronormativity and haptic aesthetics in Soviet women's cinema of
1960-1971.

Dr Natascha Drubek-Meyer

Dr Natascha Drubek-Meyer is Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Regensburg where she teaches in Media Studies and Slavic Studies. She completed her MA and PhD in Slavic Studies & History of Eastern Europe at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (Munich) where she also received her habilitation in the field of Russian and Film Studies dealing with early cinema in Russia from a cultural & media studies perspective. Parallel to her university career she worked at the Filmmuseum in Munich where she also curated film seasons.

Professor Julian Graffy, UCL SSEES

Julian Graffy is Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature and Cinema at UCL. He has written widely on Russian cinema, and his current project is concerned with the representation of foreigners in Russian film. His most recent publication are reviews of Andrei Zviagintsev's Leviafan and Petr Buslov’s Bumer; ‘Boris Barnet.“This doubly accursed cinema”’ in A Companion to Russian Cinema, ed. Birgit Beumers, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, pp. 477-99; 'Leaving the house of dreams. The myth of flight in Russian films of the 2000s’, in Russian Aviation, Space Flight, and Visual Culture, ed. Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo, London and New York, Routledge, 2017, pp. 189-223; and, with Andrei Ustinov, ‘Cherez 20 let. V 2015 gode (Posleslovie)’, in Mikhail Konoval´chuk, Sergei Sel´ianov, Vremia pechali eshche ne prishlo, ed. Andrei Ustinov, San Francisco, Akvilon, 2016, pp. 95-105.

Alex Graham, UCL SSEES

Alex Graham is a PhD candidate at UCL SSEES, working on readings of aesthetic experimentation and the politics of film production at the Lenfil'm studio between 1968 and 1991. His MA dissertation project on history, memory and readability in the completed films of Aleksei German Sr. was published as an extended article in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 6 : 2, 2012, 177-216. His other main research interests include the films of Kira Muratova, the Modernist avant-gardes and phenomenology in film theory. He is interested in the history of collection-based film curatorship and the politics of archival film preservation.

Dr Seth Graham, UCL SSEES

Dr Graham teaches courses in Russian culture at the BA and MA level at SSEES. His current interests are contemporary Russian and Soviet culture (especially film), cultural studies, gender studies, humour theory, Central Asian film, and language pedagogy. 

Dr JJ Gurga, UCL SSEES

Dr Gurga recently completed a PhD at SSEES on Ukrainian poetic cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and its reception, under the supervision of Dr Philip Cavendish.

Dr John Haynes,University of Essex

Dr Haynes teaches film at the University of Essex, where his research explores the relationships between film, history, and social change in a variety of contexts, including the Soviet Union of the 1930s-1950s. He has published articles, reviews, and book chapters on Soviet cinema of the era, as well as the monograph New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema, Manchester University Press, 2003. More recently he co-edited Cinema, State Socialism, and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917-1989: Re-Visions, Routledge, 2014; this volume includes his attempt to think through some of the meanings of the film star Liubov’ Orlova for Soviet cinema audiences both during her heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, and in the decades since. He is currently completing a documentary film and a digital archive covering the Essex University campus events of May 1968.

Dr Ana Hedberg Olenina

Dr Hedberg Olenina is an assistant professor of film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her research focuses on the early Soviet film history and media theory, with an emphasis on discursive configurations of sensory experience, emotional response, embodiment, and immersive environments. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Psychomotor Aesthetics: Conceptions of Gesture and Affect in Russian and American Modernity, 1910s–1920s. Her research has appeared in Discourse, Film History, and Kinovedcheskie Zapiski. Together with Maxim Pozdorovkin, she has co-curated two DVD releases of restored Soviet silent films, Miss Mend and Early Landmarks of Soviet Film. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and an MPhil from Cambridge University

Dr Anke Hennig, Free University, Berlin

Dr Hennig teaches at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin and is a Research Fellow in the Collaborative Research Centre 626 ‘Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits’. Her research interests lie in the poetics of Russian Formalism, the politics of Russian avant-garde media, the aesthetics of totalitarianism and in contemporary theory. In addition to numerous articles, she has also edited an anthology of Russian avant-garde texts (Über die Dinge, 2010). Her recent publications have addressed the chronotopology of cinematic fiction, the present-tense novel, and speculative poetics. She is the author of Sowjetische Kinodramaturgie (2010) and, in cooperation with Armen Avanessian, co-author of Poetika nastoiashego vremeni (2014, Russian translation of Präsens. Poetik eines Tempus, Zurich, 2012) and of Metanoia. Spekulative Ontologie der Sprache (Metanoia. Speculative Ontology of Language, Berlin, 2014).

Dr Jeremy Hicks, Queen Mary, University of London

Jeremy Hicks is a Senior Lecturer in Russian at Queen Mary University of London (UK). He is the author of Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007) and First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938-46 (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming December 2012). He has also published various articles on Russian and Soviet film, literature and journalism in Russian Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, Revolutionary Russia and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Televison.

Åsne Ø. Høgetveit (University of Tromsø The Arctic University of Norway)

Åsne Ø. Høgetveit is a postgraduate working in the field of Russian culture at the University of Tromsø The Arctic University of Norway and a member of the Russian Space: Concepts, Practices and Representations research group. She started in her position in 2015, and her project focuses on Russian cinema, morality, women and the notion of verticality. In 2016 she published the article «Memory of a soldier» (full text in Norwegian only), analysing female soldiers in Russian and Soviet cinema and in 2017 she published an article on Larisa Shepit´ko’s film Kryl´ia (Wings), entitled ‘And up she went – the moral vertical in Wings’. Åsne has also written film reviews for the online cinema journal KinoKultura.

Professor Stephen Hutchings, University of Manchester

Professor Hutchings teaches Russian film, media and culture at the University of Manchester. He has researched the relationship between literature and film. He is currently completing AHRC-funded projects examining respectively post-Soviet television culture, and European television representations of Islam.

Professor Lilya Kaganovsky, University of Illinois

Lilya Kaganovsky is Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media & Cinema Studies, and the Director of the Program in Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include two books, How the Soviet Man was Unmade (Pittsburgh, 2008) and The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928-1935 (Indiana, 2018); two edited volumes: Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s (Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky and Robert A. Rushing, Duke, 2013) and Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina, Indiana, 2014); and articles on Soviet and post-Soviet cinema. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema and regularly contributes film reviews to the on-line cinema journal KinoKultura. 

Dr Claire Knight, University of Cambridge

Dr Claire Knight is an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and is currently completing her first monograph, entitled Stalin’s Final Films: Soviet Cinema and Postwar Stalinism, 1945-53. Her recent publications centre on trophy films captured by the Red Army and Sovietized for screening across the USSR during the early Cold War, and can be found in Kritika and KinoKultura. 

Professor Diane P. Koenker, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Professor Koenker teaches in the Department of History at the University of Illinois, specializing in the history of twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union. From 1996 to 2006 she served as editor-in-chief of Slavic Review. In 2006, she co-edited, with Anne E. Gorsuch, Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (Cornell University Press). She has begun, also with Anne Gorsuch, a new project on the 1960s Soviet Union as a consumer society, drawing extensively on films of the period.

Dr Maria Korolkova, University of Greenwich

Maria Korolkova is a curator, screenwriter and researcher. She is a senior lecturer in media, communications and film studies at the University of Greenwich. Having studied media at Moscow State University, and Screen Media and Cultures at the University of Cambridge, Maria gained her doctoral degree from the University of Oxford, specialising in early Russian cinema and space. Merging the disciplines of media, film, and urban studies, Maria's research interests focus on ideological implication of contemporary creative practices and political activism. Maria’s latest publications focus on community based media and political activism in Ukraine. Her previous research explored the history of relationship between cinema and architecture that offers new ways of communication in urban environments. In 2017, she curated a season of films World to Win, exploring representations of revolution and social change in different national cinemas. She is currently working on several research projects, including the ideology of experimental sound in early Russian cinema, and the aesthetics of mistakes.

Stefan Lacny, Trinity College, University of Cambridge

Stefan Lacny is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge and is currently researching early Soviet documentary cinema in Ukraine, under the supervision of Professor Emma Widdis. His MPhil dissertation focussed on four prominent Soviet documentaries depicting Central Asia from 1926 to 1934. His main research interests include Soviet nationalities policy, national identity in Russia and eastern Europe, and borders within the former Soviet sphere.

Dr. Susan Larsen, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University

Susan Larsen recently left the University of Chicago to take a post as Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at Cambridge. Her research explores issues of gender and national identity in Russian culture from the late 18th century to the present. Her film-related publications include articles on gender and ethnicity in the work of Kira Muratova, melodramatic masculinity, and the post-Soviet blockbuster. She is currently completing a book on girls' culture in Russia from 1764 to 1917 and contemplating a new project on Soviet filmmakers' response to French and Italian cinema during the Thaw.

Dr Mark Le Fanu, Department of Anthropology, UCL

Dr Le Fanu wrote the first English-language book about Tarkovsky's films in 1987 (The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, BFI Books). Since then he has come back to the director in a variety of publications and online journals and has published interviews with a number of his artistic collaborators (see Nostalghia.com, 8 December 2007: "Interview with Tarkovsky's cameraman Vadim Yusev"). A forthcoming book (Believing in Film: Christianity and Classic European Cinema, I.B Tauris, spring 2018) pushes these explorations further into the field of Russian cinema.

Dr Daniel Levitsky, UCL SSEES

Dr Levitsky recently completed a thesis entitled Soviet history in Cinema: The Making of New Myths and Truths at SSEES, UCL under the supervision of Dr Philip Cavendish.

Professor Stephen Lovell, King's College London

Stephen Lovell is Professor of Modern History at King's College London. His books include The Shadow of War: Russia and the Soviet Union, 1941 to the Present (2010) and Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919-1970 (2015).

Dr Ian McDonald, Newcastle University 

Dr McDonald is the Director of the Research Centre for Film and founder-Director of Film@CultureLab at Newcastle University. He is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and scholar who amongst other things is researching the politics of physical culture and sport in the Soviet Union through a study of Soviet narrative and documentary sport films. In 2013, he was on the jury for the Krasnogorski International Festival of Sport Films, Moscow, Russia.

Dr Brendan McGeever, Birkbeck, University of London

Dr McGeever is Lecturer in the Sociology of Racialization and Antisemitism at Birkbeck, University of London. His monograph The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism in the Russian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019) explores the Bolsheviks' response to antisemitism during the revolutionary period. Dr McGeever's research in this area extends into Soviet film: in their confrontation with antisemitism in the 1920s, the Bolsheviks utilised not just the printed word, but moving image too. Dr McGeever also has a specialist interest in the study of racism in contemporary Russia. 

Dr Muireann Maguire, University of Exeter

Dr Maguire completed her PhD thesis on the persistence of Gothic-fantastic themes and characters in Soviet twentieth-century literature at Cambridge University in 2009. She is also interested in the use of Gothic-fantastic motifs in film of the same period, such as Konstantin Eggert's Medvezh´ia svad´ba and Eizenshtein's Ivan Groznyi. Her new research project investigates the cultural representation of scientists in Russian and Soviet culture between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, focussing on key scientific stereotypes such as the engineer, the alchemist, the biologist, and the astrophysicist.

Dr Chiara Mayer-Rieckh, UCL SSEES

Dr Mayer-Rieckh has recently completed a PhD thesis on the significance of the philosophical concept of tselostnost´ and the motif of memory in the work of Platonov, Rasputin and Tarkovskii under the supervision of Professor Julian Graffy.

Dr Milena Michalski, King's College London

Dr Michalski is Research Associate at King's College London. Research projects include the collaborative 'Pictures of Peace and Justice' on visual culture and war crimes (AHRC), and 'The Untouchables - Haptic Archiving' (Caper and the King's Cultural Institute), as well as abstraction and experimentation in film and other visual media. Long-standing research interests include the films of Abram Room and experimental fiction and documentary films of the 1920s-30s. She is also a practicing artist, working with analogue film, digital video and printmaking, and her experimental short films have been screened at various international festivals. ‘Grid References’ was shown as part of the Derek Jarman retrospective in Moscow at the National Centre of Contemporary Art and at the Moscow School of New Cinema in 2014.     

Dr Jamie Miller

Dr Miller is particularly interested in the relationship between politics and the development of the Soviet film industry in the Stalin era. He is the author of Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion under Stalin, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2010, xv + 222 pp. and journal articles about Soviet film in the Stalin period. He is currently researching the history of the Mezhrabpom / Mezhrabpomfil´m film studio over the period 1923-1936.

Dr Rachel Morley, UCL SSEES

Rachel Morley is Lecturer in Russian Cinema and Culture at UCL SSEES and Co-convenor of the Russian Cinema Research Group. Rachel’s research interests include early Russian cinema, in particular gender and the development of cinematic form and language; the early Russian film press; Soviet silent cinema and its aesthetic relationship with early Russian cinema; the resurgence of fin-de-siècle concerns in post-Soviet Russian cinema; and contemporary female filmmakers working in Russian. Rachel has published a number of articles and chapters on early Russian and Soviet cinema, including commissions for the British Film Institute (BFI). She is the author of Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema (I.B.Tauris, 2017).

José Manuel Mouriño

José Manuel Mouriño is a researcher, essayist and Spanish filmmaker who is writing a PhD thesis at the University of Vigo (Spain) under the supervision of Dr Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego. He has curated exhibitions in Spain and Portugal on important figures in cinema history such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni, and published essays on the same directors as well as on Norman Mclaren and Georges Perec. At present he is also conducting a research project on Mikhail Romm. He works for the Andrei Tarkovsky International Institute as a representative in Spain.

Professor Joan Neuberger, University of Texas at Austin

Professor Neuberger is the author of an eclectic range of publications, including Hooliganism: Crime and Culture in St Petersburg, 1900-1914 (University of California: 1993), Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion (Palgrave/MacMillan: 2003), ‘Strange Circus: Eisenstein’s Sex Drawings’, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 6: 1 (2012), 5-52, and, as co-editor, Imitations of Life: Melodrama in Russia (Duke: 2001) and Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (Yale: 2008). She has published numerous articles on Eizenshtein’s Ivan the Terrible, and is currently completing her monograph, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia.

Sheila Pattle (University of Durham)

Sheila Pattle is writing a Masters by Research thesis in the Department of Russian at Durham University, supervised by Dr Andy Byford. Her research focuses on domestic tourism in the USSR in the late Soviet period, and one of her areas of interest is tourism as reflected in Soviet films of the period. She holds a BA in Russian Studies from SSEES, UCL, where her interest in Russian films developed through courses taught by Professor Julian Graffy and Dr Philip Cavendish.
 

Dr Karen Pearlman, Macquarie University, Sydney

Dr Pearlman teaches screen production and theory at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her research into editing, rhythm, dance, film and cognitive studies of the moving image generates scholarly publications and non-traditional research outputs in the form of award-winning and widely screened films. Karen is the author of Cutting Rhythms, Shaping the Film Edit (Focal Press, 2009) and was the 2010 President of the Australian Screen Editors Guild. She has been awarded various research grants including a 2014 Macquarie University research grant for the early stages of a study of the collaboration between Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova. Karen will present preliminary findings from this study at the 2015 SCSMI Conference in London, and the study is also producing a short fiction film entitled Woman with an Editing Bench, inspired by Svilova’s life and work.  

Dr Alastair Renfrew, Department of Russian, University of Durham

Alastair Renfrew is Reader and Head of the Department of Russian at the University of Durham, where he teaches film and literature. Among his recent writings on Russian film is 'Against adaptation? The Strange Case of (Pod)Poruchik Kizhe', Modern Language Review, 102, 2007, pp. 157-76. He has published widely on the cultural and critical environment of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s, and is currently completing a monograph history of the Russian and Soviet Cinema for Routledge's National Cinemas series.

Dr John A. Riley, Woosong University, South Korea 

John A. Riley holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, which he wrote under the supervision of Professor Ian Christie. His thesis attempted a radical re-evaluation of Andrei Tarkovsky's films using contemporary theory. Articles based on his PhD research have been published in Birkbeck's postgraduate arts journal Dandelion and The Journal of Film and Video. Currently, he is writing a chapter on post-Soviet Georgian documentary filmmakers for an edited collection. He teaches English, drama and popular culture at Woosong University, South Korea. 

Professor Andrei Rogatchevski, Institute of Literature and Culture, UiT - the Arctic University of Norway

Professor Rogatchevski teaches Masters level modules in film, ‘Russian Fiction on Film and TV’ and ‘East and West on Screen’. He is primarily interested in the interaction between film/TV and literature, on the one hand, and ideology, on the other. The second edition of his book Filming the Unfilmable: Casper Wrede's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' (co-authored with Ben Hellman) Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, 94, Stuttgart, Ibidem, 248 pp., was published in 2014. A special issue of the SFFTV journal, on film adaptations of the Strugatskii brothers (co-edited with Muireann Maguire) came out in 2015.

Jane Rogoyska

Jane Rogoyska is a writer and filmmaker currently researching a book about the cultural life of Polish prisoners held in the NKVD POW camp at Starobelsk, Ukraine between October 1939 and April 1940 prior to their murder as part of the Katyń massacre. Of particular interest is a series of screenings of 1930s Soviet films chosen by the camp commissar to be shown to the prisoners as part of a programme of cultural activities aimed at converting them to Communism.

Dr Andrey Shcherbenok

Dr Shcherbenok wrote his first dissertation on Russian literature at St. Petersburg State University (2001) and his second dissertation on Soviet cinema at UC Berkeley (2006). In 2006-2009 he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is currently a Royal Society Newton International Fellow at the University of Sheffield. 

Raisa Sidenova, Yale University

Ms Sidenova is a Ph.D. Candidate in Film Studies and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where she is working on a dissertation entitled From Pravda to Vérité: Soviet Documentary on Film and Television, 1953-1982, under the supervision of Professor John MacKay and Professor Charles Musser.

Professor Nariman Skakov, Stanford University

Professor Skakov is an Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. He completed a DPhil thesis for the University of Oxford on the cinema of Andrei Tarkovskii in the summer of 2009. He is currently completing a book-length study of Tarkovskii.

Dr Alexandra Smith, Department of European Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh

Alexandra Smith is Reader in Russian at the University of Edinburgh. She teaches courses on Russian literature and film, and contributes to the postgraduate programme on Film studies. Currently she is writing a book on the interaction between poetry and film, focusing on the representation of Russian modernist poets in film.

Dr Vlad Strukov, University of Leeds

Vlad Strukov is an Associate Professor in Film and Digital Culture (University of Leeds), specialising in world cinemas, visual culture, digital media, intermediality and cultural theory. He explores theories of empire and nationhood, global journalism and grassroots media, consumption and celebrity by considering the Russia Federation and the Russian-speaking world as his case study. He is the founding and principal editor of the journal ‘Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media’ (www.digitalicons.org). He is the author of Contemporary Russian Cinema: Symbols of a New Era (Edinburgh UP, 2016), and other publications on film.

Julia Sutton-Mattocks, Universities of Bristol and Exeter

Julia is a third-year PhD student at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter, where she is working on a project exploring medicine in inter-war Russian and Czech literature and film. She is supervised by Rajendra Chitnis (Bristol) and Muireann Maguire (Exeter). Julia completed her MA in Russian and East European Literature and Culture at UCL SSEES in 2015. Her MA dissertation work on the influence of the German artists Käthe Kollwitz and Willy Jaeckel on Oleksandr Dovzhenko has since been published in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema (2016:1). 

Dr Alissa Timoshkina, King's College London

Dr Timoshkina completed a PhD on representations of the Holocaust in Soviet cinema at King's College London. She is a co-editor of a forthcoming publication The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning, Globalization (I.B. Tauris, December 2014). She currently works as a visiting teaching staff at King's College London and Royal Holloway, while pursuing post-doctoral research on representations of ethnic otherness in post-Soviet Russian cinema. 

Dr Anna Toropova, University of Cambridge

Anna Toropova wrote a thesis entitled Symptoms of Desire: Myth, Fantasy and Spectacle in Stalinist Cinema at SSEES, UCL under the supervision of Dr Seth Graham and Dr Susan Morrissey. Focusing on the genres of melodrama, war film, musical, and 'personality cult' film, the project uses psychoanalytic theory to explore the relationship between desire and ideology in the processes of cinematic signification.

Dr Julia Vassilieva, Monash University, Melbourne

Julia Vassilieva is a lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Her research interests centre on historical film theory and criticism, intersection of film, politics and philosophy, and contemporary Russian cinema and popular culture. She has conducted extensive research in the Eizenshtein archives in Russia and has published widely on Eizenshtein in English and in Russian.

Dr Candyce Veal, UCL SSEES

Candyce Veal was awarded a PhD on images of flight and aviation in Soviet film of the early Stalin period. She is interested in how cinematographic flight manifests a dynamic relation between external and internal worlds, and what this suggests about Soviet identity during this period. She has presented material for the Russian Cinema Research Group and PhD Research Group, UCL SSEES; for Queen Mary College, London; and for ‘Russian Aviation and Space: Technology and the Cultural Imagination’ workshop, Leeds University (2010). Her contribution; 'Letchiki', is published online in: Noev kovcheg russkogo kino: ot ‘Stenki Razina’ do ‘Stiliag’, Globus-Press (2012). She assisted with Russian film courses at UCL SSEES in 2004-2010 and 2012-2014.

Giuliano Vivaldi

Mr Giuliano Vivaldi is an independent film scholar based in Moscow and Brighton. He has translated the subtitles for Elem Klimov's film Sport, Sport, Sport and studied briefly at VGIK (the Russian State Institute for Cinematography). He is currently researching Soviet documentary and sport narrative films (with Dr Ian McDonald). He has published a review article for the online journal Film Philosophy on the essays of Pudovkin. He is preparing for publication articles on Boris Barnet (for the Senses of Cinema site) and on Elem Klimov.

Justine Waddell

Justine Waddell is a trustee of the Kino Klassika Foundation, which aims to restore and (re)present classics of Soviet cinema. She also works in film in several other capacities, notably as an actor, her last feature film role being Zoia in Aleksandr Zeldovich's Target (2011).

Dr Emma Widdis, Trinity College Cambridge

Dr Widdis’s most recent publication is Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling and the Soviet Subject, Indiana University Press, 2017. She is also the author of Visions of a New Land. Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003 and Alexander Medvedkin, Kinofiles Filmmakers' Companion, 2, London and New York, 2005 and the editor, with Simon Franklin, of National Identity in Russian Culture. An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 

Misha Yakovlev, University of Warwick

Misha is pursuing a PhD in film and television studies at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Dr Karl Schoonover and Professor Rachel Moseley. Their focus is shifting gender and ethnic normativities in perestroika-era Soviet and post-Soviet Russian film. Prior to this, Misha studied on the Gender, Society and Representation MA at UCL. Their MA dissertation, written under the supervision of Dr Rachel Morley, used queer and postcolonial theorising to explore gender and Orientalist normativities in Leonid Gaidai’s comedies from the 1960s.

Dr Dmitri Zakharine, King's College London

Dr Zakharine is an internationally active scholar, particularly known for his work analyzing processes of transmission and displacement of nonverbal communicative patterns in society and across societies. As a research project coordinator at King's College London, he is working on a monograph dealing with acoustic communication and the rise of listening communities in interwar Britain, Germany and the USSR. To date Dr Zakharine has published four monographs and about fifty articles devoted to the history of visual and acoustic communication in Eastern and Western Europe. Dr Zakharine completed his PhD in Moscow (1995). After submitting his postdoctoral thesis (2005) he became a member of the academic staff in the Department of Sociology and History at the University of Konstanz (Germany).