Office: 3.13, third floor, Faculty of Arts Building

Email: Anna.toropova.1@warwick.ac.uk

Office hours: by appointment

Research

My work focuses on the cultural and medical history of Russia and the Soviet Union. I am interested in the role played by cinema in the transformation of the human subject, and in the ways that Soviet political and cultural agendas overlapped with the psy disciplines.

My monograph on film as a technology of emotional education during the Stalin era, titled Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre and the Politics of Affect under StalinLink opens in a new window, was published in 2020. Reading Stalin-era cinema as a ‘laboratory’ of emotional revolution, the book brings to light film’s vital role in cultivating the distinctive emotional values and norms of the Stalin era, ranging from happiness and victorious laughter to hatred for enemies.

I am the co-author (with Claire Shaw) of Technologies of Mind and BodyLink opens in a new window, an edited volume that examines techniques of psycho-physiological transformation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc.

I currently hold a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award to investigate scientific and cultural framings of psychological trauma in the USSR, 1917-1953. The project aims to bring to light a unique tradition of research on traumatic neurosis and hysteria across the Soviet republics and to explore cultural engagements with the topic of trauma. You can find out more about the 'Traumatised Minds' project here.

In addition to leading this research project, I am finishing a monograph on the intersection of cinema, science and medicine in the early Soviet Union. The book explores how medical and scientific experts acquired knowledge about the film spectator, conveyed medical understandings of health and disease to broader audiences, and sought to deploy film in psychotherapeutic practice as well as in neurological research and teaching.

Public Engagement

I curated a public installation on film psychotherapy at the Glenside Hospital Museum in Bristol and the Worcester Medical Museum in Spring/Summer 2022. The installation showcased a short film, I Do Not Want to Smoke (2020), that I produced in collaboration with the film director Steven Sheil based on a 1936 Soviet script for a hypnotherapeutic film to aid smoking cessation. The film was officially selected for the White Deer International Film Festival, the Beeston Film Festival and the Life of Breath Festival.

I have provided commentary for BBCRadio 4Link opens in a new window and NewsTalk radio.

Teaching

HI3J7-30 Socialist Bodies: Dreams and Realities of the Physical in Soviet Russia (Venice).

HI176 Mind, Body, and SocietyLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window

HI907 Themes and Methods in Medical HistoryLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window 

Publications:

Cinema, Medicine and the Human Sciences in the Early Soviet Union, in preparation

Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre and the Politics of Affect under Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)

Technologies of the Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, co-editor with Claire Shaw (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles and Book Chapters:

‘Nervous People: Trauma and Aesthetic Hysteria in the Late Stalinist Melodrama’ in Marina Balina and Daisuke Adachi, eds., Melodrama and Melodramatic Imagination in the 20th and the 21st Century Russia: New Perspectives, forthcoming

‘Rest for the Brain or Technology of the Unconscious?: Hypnosis in Early Soviet Medicine and Culture’, in Technologies of the Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 29-50.

‘Introduction’, co-author with Claire Shaw, Technologies of the Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 1-26.

‘The Hypnotic Screen: The Early Soviet Experiment with Film Psychotherapy’, Social History of Medicine, 35.3 (2022): 946-947, open access

‘Science, Medicine and the Creation of a ‘Healthy’ Soviet Cinema’, Journal of Contemporary History,55.1 (2020): 3-28, open access

‘“Probing the Heart and Mind of the Viewer”: Scientific Studies of Film Audiences in the Soviet Union, 1917-1936’, Slavic Review, 76.4 (2017):931-958, open access

‘An Inexpiable Debt: Stalinist Cinema, Biopolitics and the Discourse of Happiness’, The Russian Review, 74.4 (2015): 665-683

‘“If we cannot laugh like that, then how can we laugh?”: The “Problem” of Stalinist Film Comedy’, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 5.3 (2011): 335-351

‘“Educating the Emotions”: Affect and Stylistic Excess in the Stalinist Melodrama’, Special issue: ‘Affect and Genre’,English Language Notes, 48.1 (Spring/Summer 2010): 49-63

Academic profile

Before joining Warwick as Assistant Professor (research focused) in 2024, I held a number of research fellowships and lectureships at universities in the UK and Denmark. I completed my PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at UCL in 2011.

2024 onwards: Assistant Professor in History, University of Warwick

2023 - 2024: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Center for Culture and the Mind, University of Copenhagen

2022-2023: Teaching Fellow in Russian History, University of Warwick

2021-2022: Department Lecturer in Russian History, University of Oxford

2016-2021: Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow, University of Nottingham

2013-2016: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cambridge

2011-2013: Teaching Fellow in History, University College London