Oleg Morozov

Christ's College
  • PhD student
Oleg Morozov

Contact

Connect

About

Oleg Morozov is a historian and memory scholar who writes and teaches on cultural memory, Queer Studies and public history, with particular focus on Russia and Germany. His research bridges memory, sexuality and mediated cultural practices, exploring how grassroots ‘useful pasts’ can challenge hegemonic historical narratives and protect marginalised groups. He combines close textual analysis with quantitative approaches, including the construction of research corpora and AI-assisted machine-learning methods. A recipient of the Hill Foundation and Ƶ Trust Scholarship, he is completing his second PhD at the Ƶ on queer memory in post-Soviet Russia.

Oleg holds a BA in Translation from the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Lomonosov Moscow State University and an MA in History with distinction from HSE University in Moscow. In 2016, he obtained his first doctorate in Russian and European history. His dissertation examined how universities in the Russian and German Empires before the First World War functioned as ‘imagined communities’, using historical jubilees as commemorative events to invent continuous institutional pasts and mobilise them either to reinforce ties to imperial governments or to contest them. This project prompted a deliberate shift towards Memory Studies in his research, as he became interested in how remembrance can be utilised to come to terms with difficult pasts such as Stalinist repression and the Holocaust, foster empathy for victims of mass violence and underpin human rights in post-authoritarian societies. In 2014, he was Visiting Research Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine strengthened his engagement with the instrumentalisation of history and the dynamics of state memory politics, as well as debates on collective responsibility and guilt in contemporary Russia.

Supervisor: Dr Daria Ezerova

 

 

Research

Oleg’s PhD thesis, Queer Memory in Post-Soviet Russia: Useful Pasts and the Survival of Russian LGBTQIA+, examines the formation, diversification and suppression of queer memory in contemporary Russia. It argues that queer memory has developed not as linear resistance to state repression but as a fragmented and fragile constellation of alternative memories emerging under conditions of both spontaneous silences and managed forgetting. Drawing on Memory Studies and queer theory, the thesis advances the concept of ‘useful pasts’ to describe forms of remembrance that enable LGBTQIA+ communities to narrate themselves, articulate their sexuality, archive the present and imagine queer-affirmative futures, while state memory politics mobilises heroic and militarised pasts to reinforce heteronormativity and queerphobia.

Structured around key practices of memory making — activism, urban memoryscapes, archiving and fanfiction — the thesis analyses queer periodicals, structured interviews, monuments and other lieux de mémoire, grassroots collections and ‘rogue archives’ such as Ficbook.net. With regard to queer fanfiction, the thesis combines in-depth textual analysis of selected works with the construction of a comprehensive database of approximately 1500 texts, using quantitative analysis supported by AI tools. By tracing how Russian queers have negotiated censorship, infrastructural precarity and the appropriation of sexual discourse by hegemonic narratives of the Second World War, the thesis contributes to Memory Studies and Queer Studies by theorising queer ‘useful pasts’ as a mode of survival and identity formation under authoritarian conditions.

Oleg has presented his research at the universities of London, Newcastle, Prague, Warsaw, Luxembourg, Tübingen, Freiburg, Heidelberg and Düsseldorf, as well as at the academies of sciences in Poland and Taiwan. He is a member of the Memory Studies Association, the International Federation for Public History and the International Commission for the History of Universities.

Scholarships/Prizes

  • Hill Foundation and Ƶ Trust Scholarship (2024–2027)
  • Best Lecturer Award, HSE University (2017–2022)
  • Academic Merit Bonus, HSE University (2018)
  • Doctoral Scholarship, German Historical Institute (2014)
  • Doctoral Scholarship, HSE University (2013–2015)

Fellowships

  • Fellow, Sonderforschungsbereich 923 ‘Bedrohte Ordnungen’, Tübingen University (2022–2023)
  • Paulsen Fellowship, London School of Economics and Political Science (2018)
  • Visiting Research Fellow, Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM (2014)

Selected Publications

  • “Geschichtspolitik und Erinnerungskultur in Russland. Aktuelle Forschungsliteratur im Kontext des russischen Angriffskriegs gegen die Ukraine. Diskussion.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 73 (2025): 80–88.
  • “Mizh samoviktymizatsiieiu i spilnoiu pamiattiu: viina Rosii proty Ukrainy v rosiiskykh nezalezhnykh media.” Politychni doslidzhennia 2 (2024): 94–115.
  • “Die Russische Orthodoxe Kirche und die Institutionalisierung der politischen Homophobie in Russland,” in Topoi und Netzwerke der religiösen Rechten, ed. Dominik Gautier, Hans-Ulrich Probst (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2024), 45–78.
  • “Das Justiz- und Strafverfolgungssystem als Erinnerungsakteure: die Entstehung eines repressiven Erinnerungsregimes in Putins Russland.” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 75 (2024): 189–203.
  • “Selbstviktimisierung: Russlands Angriffskrieg gegen die Ukraine in den russischen Exilmedien.” Osteuropa 14 (2023): 103–114.
  • “Komplizenschaft: Die ‘Kriegstheologie’ des Moskauer Patriarchats.” Religion & Geschichte in Ost und West 4 (2023): 18–20.
  • “Kriterii ocenivaniia nauchnykh tekstov v retsenziiakh vtoroi poloviny XIX veka: Zhurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 150 (2018): 129–138.
  • “Vilgelm fon Gumboldt i Berlinskii universitet: Novyi vzgliad na proiskhozhdenie ‘gumboldtovskogo mifa.’” Dialog so vremenem 60 (2017): 128–141.
  • “Wilhelm von Humboldt and Berlin University: A New Look at the Origin of the Humboldt Myth.” HSE Working Papers 134 (2016): 1–17.
  • “Nesostoiavshiisia prazdnik: 100-letnii iubilei Imperatorskogo Kazanskogo universiteta.” Rossiiskaia istoriia 2 (2016): 192–203.
  • “The Historical Past of Tübingen University within the 1927 Jubilee Context.” History of Education and Children’s Literature 9 (2014): 301–320.
  • “Legendy i mify rossiiskoi istorii: istoricheskaia politika Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi v nachale XXI veka,” in Montazh i demontazh sekuliarnogo mira, ed. Sergei Filatov and Aleksei Malashenko (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014), 255–322.

Teaching and supervision

Oleg’s teaching invites students to analyse how public memory is made and manipulated across diverse media — from film and digital games to fanfiction and manga — in Russia, Germany, Japan, Ukraine and beyond. Teaching in Russian, English and German, he has worked with diverse international cohorts and designed both lecture courses and seminars. From 2014 to 2023, he taught and supervised theses at BA and MA levels at HSE University. His teaching was recognised annually with the Best Lecturer Award at HSE University from 2017 to 2022. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he relocated to Tübingen, where he worked as Lecturer at the Institute of East European History and Area Studies until 2024. He has taught in a range of international settings, including programmes for students from Japan and the United States, and currently teaches Holocaust remembrance for mixed international groups at winter and summer programmes at the University of Tübingen, as well as for visiting students from Doshisha University (Kyoto).

  • HSE University: Culture of Remembrance (BA), History and Memory in Russia and Beyond (BA), Introduction to Imperial History (BA), Social and New Social History (BA), Social History of Science (BA), New Cultural History (BA), Russian History (BA), A Glimpse of Russian History (BA, MA), Comparative History of Universities (MA), Introduction to Public History (MA)
  • Tübingen University: Russlands Angriffkrieg gegen die Ukraine als Memory War (BA, MA), Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Osteuropa: Zwischen Geschichtspolitik und Erinnerungskultur (BA, MA), Queer Memory in the West and the East (BA, MA), Representing the Traumatic Past: Culture of Remembrance in the European Union (BA, MA)
  • Guest Lecturer: History of Post-Soviet Russia (BA, Middlebury School in Russia), History of Post-Soviet Russia (BA, International Christian University in Tokyo), Cultures of Remembrance in Germany and Japan after 1945 (BA, Doshisha University in Kyoto).