Mollie Arbuthnot is a cultural historian specializing in Soviet Uzbekistan and a 2024-2025 postdoctoral fellow in history at the Davis Center. She is interested in questions of visuality and materiality under modernizing regimes, and her research seeks to explore the place of material heritage, visual art, and museology within socialist world-making in Central Asia. She is also interested in how 21st-century contemporary artists from Uzbekistan re-work the Soviet past. Originally from the U.K., she previously held a junior research fellowship at the University of Cambridge and taught at Durham University and the University of Manchester, where she completed her Ph.D. in 2020.