Rosalind Polly Blakesley

Rosalind Polly Blakesley is Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and co-founder of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre. A Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, she has served on the board of Kettle’s Yard and the Hamilton Kerr Institute, and curated exhibitions in London, Moscow and Washington DC. Blakesley has also been a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in London, where she curated and wrote the catalogue for the exhibition Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky in 2016. Blakesley’s latest book, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia 1757-1881, was awarded the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize, the Art Newspaper Russia Best Book Award, and Honorable Mention from the Heldt Prize Committee for Best Book by a Woman in Slavic Studies. She is now working on the research project Russia, Empire and the Baltic Imagination, for which she holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2020-22. In 2017 Blakesley was awarded the Pushkin Medal by the Russian Federation for services to Anglo-Russian relations and Russian art.