Professor Emma Widdis

In broad terms, Professor Widdis is interested in the relationship between culture and ideology in the early Soviet period. Her research focuses in particular on Russian and Soviet cinema before 1953, and she also works extensively on visual culture, architecture and design, and popular science.

Recent research projects: 

In cinema, Professor Widdis focuses on the links between the political avant-garde and mainstream cinema, before the Second World War, and their shared project of constructing models of spectatorship that would correspond to new ideals of subjectivity. How could cinema create new people? Her first book, Visions of a New Land (Yale, 2003), looked at the role played by cinema in shaping a new imaginary geography for the young Soviet Union. Her most recent monograph, Socialist Senses,  traces film’s part in the Soviet project for the 'reeducation of the senses'. Other publications emerging from that research include: 'Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity', Slavic Review (2012); and 'Making Sense without Speech: Silence in Early Soviet Sound Film', in Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Kaganovsky and Salazkina eds, 2014).

She currently has two major research projects. The first expands her interest in spectatorship to consider how spectators were theorised and studied in the early Soviet Union, and the development of film criticism as a discipline. She has several graduate students who are working on this and related fields.  Her second project interrogates eco-critical models of film scholarship by considering how the natural world was pictured on screen across the Soviet century. 

Emma Widdis also maintains her research grounding in literary studies. Together with Professor Simon Franklin and Professor Rebecca Reich, she is a co-editor of The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2024), for which she also co-wrote the Introduction and a chapter on ’The New Person’. With contributions from thirty-four world-leading scholars, The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature offers a fresh and authoritative approach to literary history, not as one integral narrative but as multiple parallel histories. Each of its four strands tells a story of Russian literature according to a defined criterion: Movements, Mechanisms, Forms, and Heroes. In dialogue, these histories invite a multiplicity of readings, both within and across the narrative strands. In an age of shifting perspectives on Russia, and on national literatures more widely, The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature engages both with traditional literary concerns and with radical re-conceptualisations of Russian history and culture.

Published works: 

  Books:

• The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, edited by Simon Franklin, Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1939 (Indiana University Press, 2017)
• Alexander Medvedkin (IB Tauris, 2004)
• (with Simon Franklin) ed., National Identity in Russian Culture (CUP, 2004)
• Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (Yale University Press, 2003)

  Selected articles:

• Towards a Socialist Gaze: Theorising the Spectator in the Early Soviet Union,’ in Sarah Cooper, ed., Global Circulations of Film Theory (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2026).
• ‘Bodies, Circus and the Avant-garde in the Cinema of Ol’ga Preobrazhenskaia and Ivan Pravov,’ Slavonic and East European Journal 69: 3 (2025), 357-377.  
• The New Person’, in The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, edited by Simon Franklin, Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• “Introduction”, in The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, edited by Simon Franklin, Rebecca Reich and Emma Widdis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• A Socialist Gaze?’, in Too Hard to See: A Forum on Russian Visual Culture, edited by S.A. Oushakine, Russian Review, 81:4 (2022), 614-617.
• Making Sense without Speech: Silence in Early Soviet Sound Film’, in Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Kaganovsky and Salazkina eds, Illinois UP, 2014)
• 'Socialist Senses: Film and the Creation of Soviet Subjectivity’, Slavic Review, Vol. 71, No. 3 (2012), pp. 590-618
• ‘Child’s play: pleasure and the Soviet hero in Savchenko’s A Chance Encounter in Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Volume 6, Number 3, December 2012, pp. 319-331. 
• Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 3: 1.(2009), pp. 5-32.
• Sew Yourself Soviet: The Pleasures of Texture in the Machine Age, in: Petrified Utopia, edited by Evgenii Dobrenko and Marina Balina (Anthem Press, 2009)
• Dressing the Part: Clothing Otherness in Soviet Cinema before 1953, in: Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema, Ed. Stephen Norris and Zara Torlone (Indiana University Press, 2008) [published in Russian as Kostium, predopredelennyi rol'iu: oblachenie ''drugogo'' v sovetskom kinematografe do 1053 goda, Teoriia mody: odezhda, telo, kul'tura, Spring 2007]
• Muratova's Clothes, Muratova's Textures, Muratova's Skin. KinoKultura 8 (April 2005). [Online journal, ISSN 1478-6567]
• Sensational: The Electrified Spaces of Platonov's Screenplays, Essays in Poetics. Andrei Platonov Special Issue Vol. II. Autumn 2002
• Viewed from Below: Subverting the Myths of the Soviet Landscape, in Birgit Beumers. ed., Russia on Reels: Russian Cinema in the 1990s (IB Tauris, 1999), 66-75