Emerging Voices in REEES Colloquium | Mollie Arbuthnot

Event time: 
Thursday, November 4, 2021 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Location: 
Online () See map
Event description: 

The first colloquium in the series features Mollie Arbuthnot, Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. She will present on “Red East: Propaganda Posters for Interwar Soviet Uzbekistan”

Register to Attend on Zoom: https://bit.ly/REEES-MollieArbuthnot
The Soviet Union was the world’s first self-proclaimed anti-imperial state. Visual images seemed to offer unparalleled opportunities for communicating political ideas across borders, and propaganda imagery re-imagined the former colonies of the Russian Empire as liberated, modernising utopias. Propaganda theorists and poster artists grappled with these emancipatory visions and the Eurocentric and Orientalist strands of Soviet visual culture, as well as contradictory demands both to foster national cultures and to forge a pan-Soviet identity. This presentation will explore propaganda posters produced in the newly-formed Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, examining what they can tell us about the entanglements of visual culture and stereotype, nation-building, and modernity.
Bio:
Mollie Arbuthnot is a Junior Research Fellow in history and Russian studies at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. She specialises in visual and material culture in the Soviet Union—including mass media, propaganda, and theories of viewership—as well as the cultural history of the Soviet national republics, especially Uzbekistan. She received her PhD from the University of Manchester, and taught in the history department at Durham University, before joining Cambridge in 2021.

Mollie Arbuthnot, Junior Research Fellow in History and Russian Studies at Jesus College, University of Cambridge