Rosalind Polly Blakesley

2016 Candidate for ASEEES Board Member-at-Large

Rosalind Polly Blakesley is Reader in Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge. She also co-directs the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre which has organised exhibitions, conferences, symposia and academic exchanges, the latest of which is a co-convened conference on printed media at Yaroslavl State University in September 2016. The author of The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881 (2016), The Arts and Crafts Movement (2006), and Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (2000), she has also co-edited From Realism to the Silver Age (2014), Russian Art and the West (2007), and An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (2003). Blakesley is a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and has curated and written the catalogue for Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky (part of a major exchange between the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, and the National Portrait Gallery, 2016). She has also curated other exhibitions in London, Moscow and Washington DC, and advises British and Russian museums and galleries on Russian projects and international links. She has been a peer reviewer for the Russian Science Foundation, Getty Grant Program, Leverhulme Trust, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, as well as journals and university presses in Europe and the USA. Her many administrative roles at Cambridge include serving on the Advisory Council of the Hamilton Kerr Institute and the Steering Committee of the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies. She will chair the History of Art Department from October 2016.