Dr Rachel Polonsky announced as Acting President
A distinguished scholar and long-serving Fellow, Dr Polonsky brings trusted leadership and academic excellence to her new role
Â鶹ƵµÀ is delighted to announce that Dr Rachel Polonsky has been elected as Acting President for the coming academic year. A respected academic, Rachel is an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge. She is a longstanding member of the Governing Body at Â鶹ƵµÀ and has been a Fellow since 2011. She also served as Vice-President from 2019 to 2023.
Rachel says:
"It will be great honour to serve Murray Edwards as Acting President, working with all my colleagues to ensure that the College is full of clear purpose and good cheer for the next President. I have long treasured this unique environment for women's education. We begin the year celebrating the 60th anniversary of our beautiful modernist buildings, which manifest the inspiring vision of our founder and first President, Rosemary Murray."
Rachel read English at Jesus College from 1983 to 1986, and moved to Russian Studies as a graduate student, taking an MA at Princeton University and later (after a spell working in journalism in Paris) a DPhil at Oxford. Her doctoral thesis examined the reception of English Literature in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. She returned to Cambridge as a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College in 1994, where her thesis became a book: English literature and the Russian aesthetic renaissance (CUP). In 1998 Rachel moved with her husband Marc and young daughters to Moscow, where they lived for the next ten years. She worked there as an independent scholar and freelance journalist, writing for a wide range of scholarly and periodical publications. On her return, Rachel published Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History (Faber, 2010). It was published in the US in 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and has appeared in Dutch, French, Polish, Chinese, Portuguese, and Italian.