Mollie Arbuthnot

Mollie Arbuthnot is a cultural historian specializing in Soviet Uzbekistan and was a postdoctoral fellow in history at the Davis Center in 2024-2025. 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.