Eleonor Gilburd, "To See Paris and Die: The S...

Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lewis Ryder examines John Hilditch (1872-1930), a notorious collector of Chinese art who lied, hoaxed and manipulated in his struggle against ...  Show more

Is food porn a vibrant and democratic new expression of modern food culture or a superficial addition to an image-saturated world? Tracing its origins from the 1970s to today, this timely book examines the evolution of food porn as a desire-inducing aesthetic practice and a visua ...  Show more

Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West.  A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus on peaceful cooperation with foreign powers.  A year after Stalin’s death, author ...  Show more

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which tells the fantastical story of a visit of the devil to the Soviet Union, is considered to be one of the most successful Russian novels of the 20th Century. Written in secret in the 1930s when Stalinist repression of the arts was ...  Show more

In The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival (Penn State University Press, 2018), Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the r ...  Show more

Antony Kalashnikov's Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time (Cornell UP, 2023) analyzes Stalinist monument-building. From the 1930's through the Great Patriotic War, architectural monuments such as subway stations were designed to emphasize ...  Show more