Margaret Borozan

I am a PhD student in Russian and East European History, focusing on Soviet byt. I graduated from Columbia with a BA in History in 2021, and from Cambridge with an MPhil in Comparative Literatures and Cultures in 2022. 

During my MPhil, I researched the representation of bread by Soviet diarists in the 1930s, analyzing how these diarists synthesized the changing state narrative over the decade, millennia of religious symbolism, and the materiality of labor and hunger into the stories of their lives. 

Continuing my research into the relationship between the state, literacy, and subjectivity, I am now working on Soviet pornography and erotic literature, looking at its relationship to censorship and, by extension, the tradition and historical memorialization of soviet samizdat.