Pauline Fairclough
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 monograph, 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. 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).
My biography of Shostakovich, written for Reaktion Books' 'Critical Lives' series, was published in 2019.
From 2021-23 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and will be writing a monograph on Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for Oxford University Press.
I am an elected Vice-President of the Royal Musical Association, co-editor of the CUP journal Twentieth-Century Music, General Editor of Routledge's Russian and East European Music series and I am on the editorial board of the Moscow journal Iskusstvo muzïki. Teoriya i istoriya (The Art of Music. Theory and History). Together with Olga Digonskaya of the Shostakovich Archive in Moscow,
I run the 'Shostakovich and his Epoch' study group of the International Musicological Society.
Source: University of Bristol
