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CRUSH

Cambridge Russian Sensory History Network
 

Emma Widdis has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship for work on the anthology Revolutionary Bodies, Soviet Minds, which will be a major new collection of translated and annotated primary source materials from Soviet Russia. The collected texts are drawn from a wide range of fields - psychology, neuroscience, eugenics, sport, dance, design, ideolog, art. Together, they show the scale of the Soviet ambition to create a new kind of human body and mind. The finished work will be a history of science and a history of culture. It shows how scientists, ideologues and artists shared a dream of a 'sensory revolution' to accompany the political and social revolution of 1917. Soviet man and woman would be reborn; their senses, as Marx had said, would be 'emancipated' by Socialism.

 

We are delighted to announce the publication of two major new works by CRUSH network members: Claire Shaw's Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 (Cornell, 2017), and Emma Widdis's Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling and the Soviet Subject (Indiana, 2017)