Zbigniew Wojnowski

Dr Zbigniew Wojnowski is Associate Professor in Soviet History at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He completed his PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL in 2011, and previously held posts at Nazarbayev University (Astana) and the University of Roehampton (London), joining Oxford in 2022.

Education:

• PhD, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2011

Research Interests:

Dr Wojnowski is a historian of Ukraine, Russia, and Central Asia whose work explores interethnic relations, imperial dynamics and identity politics in the USSR. His first monograph, The Near Abroad: Socialist Eastern Europe and Soviet Patriotism in Ukraine, 1956-1985, traces how cross-border flows of people and ideas shaped Ukrainian and Soviet identities after Stalin. Current projects extend this focus into the 1980s-1990s, examining the collapse of the USSR through the prism of Soviet and post-Soviet show business, and an environmental history of late-twentieth-century Kazakhstan.

Research Keywords: Cold War, Soviet bloc, systemic transformation, popular music, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, USSR, Central Asia, East-Central Europe.

Publications Trends: Across more than twenty peer-reviewed articles and essays, Wojnowski’s scholarship bridges Soviet cultural policy, popular music industries, nationality politics and post-socialist transition. Recurring themes include the emotional and cultural dimensions of late socialism, the role of music and media in identity formation, and the legacies of 1956, 1968 and 1989 in Soviet borderlands.

Current & Future Projects:

• Book project: From Red Stars to Pop Empires: Show Business and the Collapse of the USSR
• Environmental history of Kazakhstan in the late Soviet period
• Supervision of doctoral research on non-Russian Soviet republics, systemic transformation and USSR-Cold-War intersections

Laboratory / Research Groups: While no formal lab is listed, Dr Wojnowski is embedded within Oxford’s vibrant Russian and Eurasian Studies community at St Antony’s College and welcomes prospective graduate students interested in late-Soviet and post-Soviet history.