Catriona Kelly
Catriona Helen Moncrieff Kelly, FBA is a British academic specialising in Russian culture. She is Professor of Russian at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College.
Catriona Kelly was brought up in London. Her parents were pianist Alexander Kelly and cellist Margaret Moncrieff. Her sister is the cellist Alison Moncrieff-Kelly and she is married to neuroscientist Professor Ian Thompson. Her grandfather was Alexander Moncrieff and Hope Mirlees was her mother's first cousin. She was educated at the school in London run by the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion and at Godolphin and Latymer School. After spending six months living in Vienna, she read Russian and German at the University of Oxford, including a year as a visiting student at Voronezh State University, USSR, sponsored by the British Council. She went on to complete a doctorate on the Russian poet Innokenty Annensky at Oxford.
She was a Senior Scholar and Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford and then Lecturer in Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, before taking up her present position at the University of Oxford and New College.
Catriona Kelly is the author of many books about Russian history and culture, including Petrushka, the Russian Carnival Puppet Theatre, A History of Russian Women's Writing, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin,Russian Literature, A Very Short Introduction,Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero, a study of the boy hero Pavlik Morozov, St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past, Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918-1988, and articles for professional journals and for the general press. She is the editor of Utopias: Russian Modernism, 1905-1940 and of Russian Modernism and the Visual Arts. In 2015, Catriona Kelly was President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the first person working at a university outside the United States to be appointed to this position.
