Catriona Kelly, M.A., D.Phil. FBA
Research
I work on Soviet and Russian cultural history, particularly modernism, gender history, the history of childhood, national identity, urban history (e.g. Leningrad-St Petersburg), and the institutional and production history of Russian and Soviet cinema. I am currently working on Film Factory of Nations: The Past on the Soviet Screen, 1956-1991, which includes films from Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan, as well as Russia. Over the last four years, I have visted ten former Soviet republics to do research in archives on this project, and also Berlin and Los Angeles for work on a related project on Cold War-era biopics. I have recently given invited lectures, keynote addresses and talks in a variety of venues, including Yerevan, Paris, Prague, Potsdam, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston as well as the UK.
I am not currently taking on doctoral students at Oxford, since I retired from my full-time post in 2021, but am happy to provide informal advice on subjects in which I am competent.
Grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy, as well as the University of Oxford and New College, 2002-2007, funded my work on Children's World (Yale U.P. 2008) (see http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/childhood). From 2007 to 2011, I led a large international project on Russian national identity, sponsored by a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (see http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/nationalism). My study of cultural memory in Leningrad/St Petersburg since 1957, supported by work in archives, interviews, and first-hand observation as well as work with printed sources, St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past, was published by Yale University Press in 2014. Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities, co-edited with Mark Bassin, came out in 2012 from Cambridge University Press. I have published extensively on the preservation of architectural heritage, and the history of cinema in the post-Stalin years, particularly under Brezhnev. My other interests include oral history (for information about the Oxford Archive of Life History, see http://www.ehrc.ox.ac.uk/lifehistory).
For a podcast about my research on childhood (the interviewer is writer and translator George Miller, a graduate of the Faculty), see http://podularity.com/2008/02/15/russian-childhood/. A video clip appears on http://vimeo.com/87023564. For other interviews about the book on Petersburg, see Alexander Kan, BBC World Service, http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/multimedia/2014/01/140118_5f_kan_petersburg_book.shtml (in Russian) and also http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/shadows-of-the-past3a-st-petersburg/5258316 (ABC Radio, Sydney).
Interviews in Russian about my work include Egor Sennikov for Republic.ru (https://republic.ru/posts/90447?code=99fe5a752db51b2a45f128ddb5f1c944), Stanislav Kuvaldin for Colta.ru (https://www.colta.ru/articles/mosty/21502-katriona-kelli-mnogie-rezhissery-staralis-dokazat-marginalnost-svoego-polozheniya-v-sisteme), and Masha Nesterenko for Gorky Media https://gorky.media/context/ot-petrushki-do-pavlika-morozova/?fbclid=IwAR097PS4sn-zYOyYsbSvh5xiawwGsQlYhihxEtWosnbj-HQ0muMWmXYw668
Selected Publications
(for a more detailed list, see my academia.edu account and https://www.mmll.cam.ac.uk/people/catriona-kelly)
'New Republics, Old Wounds: Difficult History in 1960s Films from the Baltic Republics and Moldavia', Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 103, no. 2, April, 2025.
'Mentoring and the "National Cinema": Andrei Tarkovsky’s Letters to Bagrat Hovhannisyan (1972–1981)'. Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, vol. 19, no. 2, 2025.
A History of Russian Food from 1800: Empire at Table (London: ‘Bloomsbury Russian Shorts’ series; 2024).
‘Space Exploration’, afterword to Rethinking Socialist Spaces, ed. Paul Betts and Marcus Colla. (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2024.)
‘Imperial Transnationality: On Soviet Screens’, contribution to ‘Russian and Slavonic Studies at the Crossroads’, ed. Andy Byford, Connor Doak, and Stephen Hutchings, Forum for Modern Language Studies, July 2024.
Out of Focus: Collected Essays on Russia and its Margins (Oxford: Legenda, 2023).
‘“Меня больше всего радуют слезы на глазах зрителей, а их много”: слезы в позднесоветском кино’ [‘What Delights Me Most Is Tears in the Eyes of the Audience, and There are Many of Them’: Screen Tears in the Late Soviet Period], Слезы в русской культуре [Tears in Russian Culture], ed. Konstantin Bogdanov, (Moscow, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2023).
Санкт-Петербург: тени прошлого (Russian translation by Oxana Yakimenko of St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past below.) (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2022). (Also available as an audiobook.)
‘The Motherland and the Fight with Fascism: War Film and War Cult under Brezhnev’, Russian Review, July 2024.
‘Re-Visions of the Leader: Lenin Biopics in the Post-Stalin Era’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 25, no. 1 (2024), https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/28/article/919522/pdf. ;
‘Beyond Censorship: Goskino USSR and the Management of Soviet Film, 1963-1985’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 99, no. 3 (July 2021), pp. 432-63.
Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev (Oxford University Press, 2021). (Translation into Russian underway for Boston: Academic Studies Press.)
‘Memory and Truth: Stravinsky’s Childhood (1882-1901)’, in Graham Griffiths (ed.), Stravinsky: A Cambridge Companion (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Стоп-кадр: Катриона Келли, «Мама вышла замуж» [Freeze Frame: Catriona Kelly on Vitaly Mel'nikov's Mother's Got Married ],1.10.2018 https://seance.ru/blog/stop-kadr/kelly-mama-vyshla-zamuzh/
Период запоя: Кинопроизводство в Ленинграде брежневской эпохи [Period of Intoxication: Filmmaking in Brezhnev-Era Leningrad] // Новое литературное обозрение. № 152. 2018. https://www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/152/article/20023/
‘Protest and Discipline: Shostakovich and the Revolutionary Self’, in Vestnik Sankt-Peterburskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Istoriya. Vol. 63 (2018), no. 4, pp. 1132-55. http://vestnik.spbu.ru/html18/s02/s02v4/09.pdf
'Russian Modernism: Kandinsky, Stravinsky, Mayakovsky' for The Cambridge History of Russian Modernism ed. Vincent Sherry (2017).
Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918-1988 (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016).
St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past (Yale University Press, 2014). (Forthcoming in Russian, Bibliorossika/Academic Studies Press, 2021). (Shortlisted for the Pushkin Russian Book Prize.)
‘The New Soviet Man and Woman’, in Simon Dixon (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Russian History <http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199236701.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199236701-e-024>St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past (Yale University Press, 2014).
'Leningrad Cuisine/La cuisine leningradaise: A Contradiction in Terms?', Forum for Anthropology and Culture, no. 9 (2013), http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/eng009/kelly.pdf
(ed., with Mark Bassin) Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
'"Исправлять ли историю": споры об охране памятников в Ленинграде 1960-х-1970-х гг.', Neprikosnovennyi zapas (special number "Советская память/Память о советском"). Also co-editor of the introduction., 2 (2009), , Article Weblink
With Svetlana Sirotinina, '"I didn't understand, but it was funny": Soviet state festivals through the eyes of children', Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 5 (2008). http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/eng005/kelly_sirotinina.pdf.
Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). (Awarded the Grace Abbott Prize of the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, 2009).
Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero Also in Russian as Товарищ Павлик: Взлет и падение советского мальчика-героя) (London, Granta Books; М.: НЛО, 2005; 2009)
Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001)
Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001)
Editor, with Stephen Lovell, Russian Literature, Modernism and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: CUP, 2000 (reprinted 2008))
With David Shepherd, Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998)
A History of Russian Women's Writing (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994)
Petrushka, the Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre (Cambridge CUP, 1990 (reprinted 2009))