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I value this College's continuing commitment to women's education. I am continually inspired by the sense of shared purpose in the College and the warm fellowship of my colleagues. It is a delight to see our students bring their energy and inspiration to the challenge of bringing on this young institution within the richly complex environment of a great and ancient collegiate university

Degrees and honours

• MA (Cantab)
• MA (Princeton),
• and D.Phil (Oxon).

Awards and prizes

• Dolman Prize Travel Book of the Year 2011,
• and Premio di Saggistica "Citta delle Rose" 2015.

Research interests

Rachel's scholarly interests include nineteenth and twentieth century poetry, fiction, and memoir, often with a comparative emphasis, and the place of Russian literature in the overlapping contexts of cultural, intellectual, and political history. 

Biography

Rachel is an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Slavonic Studies and has been a Fellow of Murray Edwards since 2011. She is a longstanding member of the College’s Governing Body and was Vice-President between 2019 and 2023. Rachel read English at Jesus College from 1983-1986, 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.