I am a cultural historian specialising in Soviet music and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. My first book, A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (Ashgate, 2006) was an in-depth study of Shostakovich's symphonic masterpiece, which had to wait twenty five years for its premiere in the post-Stalin era. My second book, funded by an AHRC Early Career Fellowship and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, was Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (Yale, 2016), which was co-winner of the BASEES Women's Forum Book Prize in 2018 and won the 2017 Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title. It has been translated into Spanish as Clásicos para las masas (Akal, 2021).

I have edited four volumes: The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (with David Fanning, Cambridge University Press, 2008), Shostakovich Studies 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Twentieth Century Music and Politics: Essays in memory of Neil Edmunds (Ashgate, 2012) and 1917 and Beyond: Continuity, Rupture and Memory in Russian Music (MHRA, 2019, with Philip Bullock). I have a fifth edited collection forthcoming in March 2026 from Indiana University Press, co-edited with Peter Schmelz, Unpredictable Encounters: Reconsidering Russian Music.

My biography of Shostakovich, written for Reaktion Books' 'Critical Lives' series, was published in 2019 and translated into Turkish in 2023.

From 2021-23 I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and my study of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for Oxford University Press's 'Keynotes' series was published in 2025: https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197534977.001.0001 

I am General Editor of Routledge's Slavonic and East European Music series and with Olga Digonskaya of the Shostakovich Archive in Moscow, I run the 'Shostakovich and his Epoch' study group of the International Musicological Society. From 2017-2022 I was an elected Vice-President of the Royal Musical Association. In 2024 I co-founded the Royal Musical Association Study Group 'Music of Eastern Europe and Eurasia'. Our inaugural conference, 'Music on the Move in Communist Europe' was held in the Department of Music, University of Bristol, in 2025.

Conferences organised:

'Music on the Move in Communist Europe', with Dr Mariia Romanets, Department of Music, University of Bristol, 28-29 May 2025. https://rmameee.wordpress.com/music-on-the-move-in-communist-europe/  

'Russian and Soviet Music: Reappraisal and Rediscovery' with Patrick Zuk, Music Department, University of Durham, 11-14 July 2011. http://www.dur.ac.uk/music/russianmusicconference2011/

'Shostakovich 2006: International Centenary Conference' http://www.bris.ac.uk/arts/birtha/conferences/shostakovich

'1948 and all that: Music, Politics and Power in the Soviet Union' with Marina Frolova-Walker, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 2009: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/962

'Twentieth-century Music and Politics', Department of Music, University of Bristol, 14-16 April 2010 http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/birtha/conferences/music_politics