Dr Polly Jones

Lecturer in Russian

Email
p.jones@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Phone Number
020 7679 8723

Fax
020 7679 8777

My interest in Russian culture began at school, and I went to on to study Russian and French at New College Oxford, spending my third year of my degree in St Petersburg, working for the St Petersburg Times.

After a year at Harvard as the Harlech scholar, I returned to St Antony's College Oxford to complete my MPhil and DPhil degrees in Russian. My DPhil compared the processes of de-Stalinisation in the Khrushchev era and de-Leninisation in the post-communist period. After holding two Junior Research Fellowships at Oxford, I joined SSEES-UCL as a Lecturer in 2004.

Research Interests
I am primarily interested in the cultural politics of the post-Stalin period, with a particular focus on the process of de-Stalinisation under Khrushchev, on which I have published numerous articles and two edited volumes: The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (Routledge, 2006; paperback edition, 2009) and The Relaunch of the Soviet Project, 1945-64 (a special issue of SEER, April 2008).

I am currently completing a monograph on the management of the public memory of Stalinism entitled Stalin after Stalinism. Memories of the Stalinist Past in and as Soviet Culture, 1953-68. I am also writing a monograph on the Soviet Union after Stalin, entitled Burying Stalin. The Soviet Union between Past and Future, 1953-91 (under contract with OUP).

My future plans include the publication of a volume of translated archival sources on the cultural and social history of the post-Stalin period, and a study of late socialist Soviet culture.

My approach has always been interdisciplinary, combining historical and cultural studies methodologies, and I am developing an interest in comparative studies of socialist culture, especially late socialism. More broadly, my research interests include: Soviet culture, especially late socialism; visual culture, especially the iconography of leader cults; resistance, dissidence and subjectivity; memory studies; representations of trauma and violence in literature and visual culture.

My research is conducted primarily in Russian archives, many of them recently de-classified, and I have a particular interest in making archival sources more widely available to scholars and students. I am the coordinator of the Russian Archive Training Scheme funded by CEELBAS, CRCEES and BASEES, which runs training workshops in Moscow and the UK for doctoral students.

Teaching and supervision
I am currently supervising PhD students working on the following topics: literary narratives of trauma in Vasilii Grossman and Iurii Dombrovskii; the politics of history-writing in post-socialist Hungary; and the representation of Soviet history in Soviet film, 1953-68.

I welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students wishing to pursue research into any aspect of 20th-century literature and culture, particularly the post-Stalin period and themes connected with memory and trauma.

I am involved in teaching a wide range of culture, literature and language courses at SSEES, at both BA and MA level.

• Between Permitted Dissent and Dissidence: Accommodation, Resistance and Protest in the Post-Stalinist Soviet Intelligentsia (MA)
• Contemporary Cultural Studies: Between post-Modernism and Post-Communism (MA)
• Advanced Russian (MA)
• Stalinism and De-Stalinisation (BA)
• Russian Literature from the Death of Stalin to the Present (BA)
• The Making of Modern Russian Culture (BA)
• Bulgakov (BA)
• 1A Reading and Writing (BA)

Recent Publications

Additional Publications

This page last modified Wednesday 26 May 2010.