15 January 2016
Students took part in the first ever History Dissertation Day at The Wilson Gallery in Cheltenham. January can be a very stressful time for third-year students approaching the final few months of their undergraduate studies. Weighing heavy on…
14 January 2016
To add to the list of programmes posted earlier, Start the Week on BBC R4 on Monday 11 January is ‘Russia: Tsars to Putin’. Guest speakers include Simon Seebag Montefiore and Amanda Vickery. Interestingly, Vickery talks a little…
6 January 2016
On the TV, BBC2’s showing of ‘Leningrad and the Orchestra that Defied Hitler’ examines Dmitry Shostakovich’s 7th (Leningrad) Symphony, performed in 1942 when the city was under siege and credited with helping to break the blockade. Amanda Vickery…
25 November 2015
Congratulations to former UG History staff member Dr Anna French on the publication of her new book Children of Wrath: Possession, Prophecy and the Young in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2015). This book explores questions surrounding early modern…
2 April 2015
Last weekend, I attended the annual British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) conference at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge. The BASEES conference now serves as the major European platform for researchers in Russian and East European…
17 February 2015
On 31 December 1991, the Soviet Union was officially declared dissolved. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was officially created on 30 December 1922, following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The USSR was not immediately recognised by…
14 February 2015
The Bolshevik Revolution of 25 October 1917 had a profound impact not only on the Western world but also on the global history of the twentieth century. During the Soviet period, the revolution was celebrated on 7 November…
2 February 2015
A massive fire that broke out on Friday evening has destroyed the building housing one of Moscow’s major research libraries and unique collections of social science and humanities documentation. It has been reported that an electrical fault caused…
5 November 2014
My chapter ‘Contesting Inequality: Khrushchev and the Revival of the “Woman Question”’ has recently been published in a volume on essays edited by colleagues in Germany: Thomas M. Bohn, Rayk Einax and Michel Abeβer (eds), De-Stalinisation Reconsidered: Persistence…
9 September 2014
My latest collection of essays, co-edited with Katalin Miklossy (University of Helsinki, Finland) was published by Routledge in August. The book is one of the outcomes of a three-year international collaborative project funded by the Academy of Finland…