Rate My Professor Anna Toropova

Toropova's research centers on the cultural and medical history of Russia and the Soviet Union, with a particular emphasis on the role of cinema in transforming the human subject and the intersections of Soviet political and cultural agendas with the psy disciplines. She leads the Wellcome Trust-funded 'Traumatised Minds' project, which examines scientific and cultural approaches to psychological trauma in the USSR from 1917 to 1953. Her major publications include the monograph Feeling Revolution: Cinema, Genre, and the Politics of Affect under Stalin (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the co-edited volume Technologies of Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Other key works are 'From Neurasthenia to "Experimental Neurosis": Early Soviet Cinema, Psychiatry, and the Problem of Nervousness' (Isis, forthcoming 2026), 'The Hypnotic Screen: The Early Soviet Experiment with Film Psychotherapy' (Social History of Medicine, 2022), 'Science, Medicine and the Creation of a “Healthy” Soviet Cinema' (Journal of Contemporary History, 2020), and '“Probing the Heart and Mind of the Viewer”: Scientific Studies of Film Audiences in the Soviet Union, 1917-1936' (Slavic Review, 2017). Toropova has secured significant funding through the Wellcome Trust Career Development Award and has engaged in public outreach, including commentary for BBC Radio 4 and curating installations on Soviet film psychotherapy.