Rate My Professor Anna Toropova

Anna Toropova is Assistant Professor in History in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick. She earned her PhD from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London in 2011. Her distinguished career encompasses several prestigious academic appointments: Department Lecturer in Russian History at the University of Oxford from 2021 to 2022, Teaching Fellow in Russian History at the University of Warwick from 2022 to 2023, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Culture and the Mind, University of Copenhagen from 2023 to 2024, Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Nottingham from 2016 to 2021, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2013 to 2016, and Teaching Fellow in History at University College London from 2011 to 2013.

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.