Dr Mollie Arbuthnot

Junior Research Fellow in History and Russian Studies
Image

Mollie Arbuthnot specialises in visual and material culture in the early Soviet Union—including mass media, propaganda, and theories of viewership—as well as the history of Soviet multinationalism. Her PhD explored propaganda posters and the construction of national identity in 1920s–30s Uzbekistan, while her current research project examines Islamic and Central Asian objects in Soviet museums.

During her PhD at the University of Manchester, she also spent time as a visiting researcher at the European University at St. Petersburg and the History Institute of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences, and completed a research project at the British Library in London.

She taught in the History department at Durham University before joining Cambridge in 2021.

Supervision

Dr Arbuthnot welcomes enquiries from students and prospective students wishing to pursue topics related to her research interests, listed below:

  • 20th-century visual culture
  • Modernism
  • Soviet social and cultural history
  • Museums and heritage
  • Empire, anti-imperialism, and national identity in the Soviet Union
  • Central Asia

Contact

Tags & Themes

Address

Jesus College, Jesus Lane, Cambridge, CB5 8BL

Email
ma517@cam.ac.uk

Publications

‘Propaganda in Translation: The Imagined Muslim Viewers of Early Soviet Posters,’ in Joan Neuberger, Valerie Kivelson, and Sergei Kozlov (eds.) Picturing Russian Empire (forthcoming).

‘The People and the Poster: Theorizing the Soviet Viewer, 1920–1931,’ Slavic Review 78/3 (Fall 2019): pp. 717–37. Winner of the Manchester Doctoral College Excellence Award for Outstanding Output, and an honourable mention for the British Association of Slavic and East European Studies postgraduate prize.