Personal profile

Biography

I am a historian of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and my research to date has primarily focused on histories of gender, sexuality, and medicine. I joined the University of Manchester in January 2023 as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow. Before this, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Durham University and a Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship at the University of Latvia in Riga. 

Overview

My Wellcome project, entitled ‘Red Humanitarianism: The Soviet Red Cross and Public Health, 1953–1991’, examines the meaning and scope of medical volunteerism in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. The decades between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 were marked by successive public health crises. Severe population depletion, staggering rates of industrial pollution, and chronic underfunding of healthcare facilities resulted in an upsurge in infectious diseases, rising rates of maternal and infant mortality, declining life expectancy and stagnant population growth. My project assesses how the Soviet Red Cross responded to healthcare crises that were exacerbated by government policy whilst also remaining dependent on state approval and resources. Using multi-site archival research and oral history interviews, my project explores the meaning, scope, and motivations behind medical volunteerism in a society where citizen participation was deemed compulsory, and sometimes even necessary, to supplement state healthcare services. In doing so, I will assess how this ‘red humanitarianism’ was used to address successive public health and humanitarian crises during the Cold War era.

Research interests

My published work to date has primarily used sexuality and sexual health as lenses for examining the relationship between the Russian imperial/Soviet state and its subjects/citizens. I am particularly interested in moving beyond the perspectives of political elites and medical experts based in Moscow and St Petersburg to explore how ordinary people engaged with ideas about morality, gender, sex, and health across the vast space of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. This interest has led me to publish a series of articles and chapters on the history of prostitution, pornography, procurement, social welfare, masculinity, and sex education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My first book, entitled Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2021), provides a social history of prostitution in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Using prostitution as a lens to examine lower-class society, the book explores how the state regulation of prostitution formed part of wider mechanisms to monitor the behaviour and bodies of those on the social periphery. Drawing upon archival material from Moscow, St Petersburg, Arkhangel’sk, Riga, Vilnius, Minsk, Kyiv and Tartu, Policing Prostitution examines how registered prostitutes, their clients, their managers and wider urban communities experienced and resisted the policing characteristic of the Russian system for the regulation of prostitution. Policing Prostitution was awarded the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Women's Forum Book Prize, the Women's History Network Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Book Prize.

I am also one of the editors of the a collaborative digital history project called Peripheral Histories? The project aims to highlight peripheral spaces, actors and events; examine the changing status of and relations between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’; and explore the ways in which borderlands have been remade in particular historical circumstances. Our website provides a space to share emerging research on regions and peoples of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe that have been perceived as geographically, politically or culturally ‘peripheral’.

Memberships of committees and professional bodies

Editor, Contemporary European History

Board Member, Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

 

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 1 - No Poverty
  • SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
  • SDG 4 - Quality Education
  • SDG 5 - Gender Equality
  • SDG 8 - Decent Work and Economic Growth
  • SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities
  • SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
  • SDG 17 - Partnerships for the Goals

Education/Academic qualification

PhD History, University of Nottingham

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