This is an event focused on the challenges of researching post-Soviet collections, archives and artefacts in the post-Soviet era, the difficulty of identifying and redescribing items as part of a national story and extracting them from dominant Russian imperial constructions. Katya Rogatchevskaia will talk about these issues in general terms with regard to the British Library collections, and the three other participants will talk about their experience as PhD researchers negotiating this problem. Darya Lis about the Belarusian context; Assiya Issemberdiyeva about the Central Asian context; and Oleksandr Teliuk about the Ukrainian context, each focusing on one or two artefacts.

This event is intended especially to focus on the issues faced by PhD students, as well as the wider research community.

Katya Rogatchevskaia (Lead Curator, East European Collections at the British Library). Katya Rogatchevskaia joined the BL to lead the East European Collection in 2003. Previously she had taught various courses related to Russian literature, language and culture at Russian State University for Humanities (Moscow), Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities, and had worked as a research fellow at the Institute of World Literature (Moscow).

Darya Lis (PhD Student QMUL-BL, History), focusing on Belarus. Darya Lis is a PhD Student, funded by the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Project scheme, and supervised by the Department of History, QMUL, and the British Library. Her PhD project is entitled ‘Reframing Postcolonial Discourse in East European Studies: The Case Study of the Belarus Collection at the British Library.’

Assiya Issemberdiyeva (PhD Student QMUL, Modern Languages and Cultures), focusing on Central Asia. Assiya Issemberdiyeva is a PhD student at the Department of Modern Languages at Queen Mary, University of London. She studied Journalism at the Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (BA, MA) and Film Studies at the Queen Mary University of London (MA). In 2021 she obtained a Collaborative Doctoral Award in Visual Cultures funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership with a thesis on British attitudes to the representation of Soviet Non-Slavic identities. Her project looks at the representation of Central Asian narratives in wartime Soviet cinema and the structure within which it was produced, analysing its reception both in the USSR and in Great Britain. The working title of her thesis isBritish Attitudes to Non-Russian Identities in World War Two Campaigns for British Aid to the Soviet Union.

Oleksandr Teliuk (PhD Student QMUL, Film Studies), focusing on Ukraine. Oleksandr Teliuk is a film archivist, curator, and currently a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. He worked at the Dovzhenko Center, the Ukrainian state film archive, and later finished an MA programme at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation and the University of Rochester in the USA.