Maxim Lukin

Maxim Lukin is a first-year doctoral student in History at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include  Russian and Soviet cultural and intellectual history, social history of cultural production, and transnational history of socialist bloc countries. Focusing on Soviet print culture and book publishing after Joseph Stalin's death, he studies the state cultural policies aimed at constructing the late socialist subject, covert ideologies in the Soviet society, and the boundaries between official and underground cultures. He is also interested in various forms of Soviet censorship and ways of resisting it. 

During his undergraduate studies, Maxim was a student research assistant at the Institute for Advanced Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia (2020-2023). He participated in the research projects on the social networks and institutions in Soviet literature and on Soviet temporal imagination and time-management policies. He also worked as an assistant curator (together with Rivka Maichak) for the exhibition about the lives of Soviet Jews who fought in the Second World War at the Moscow Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (2024, curated by Oleg Budnitskii, Maria Gadas, and Svetlana Amosova). 

Advisor: Prof. Benjamin Nathans