Time and Material Culture: Rethinking Soviet Temporalities

This edited volume offers an original exploration into the ways in which Soviet culture and experience of time were unique, examining the temporalities expressed in the world of socialist things: from the objects of everyday life to urban architecture.

Grounding the analysis of Soviet temporalities in their material incarnations not only lends concreteness to discussions of temporal culture, but also draws out ways in which the specificities of Soviet things―and their planning, design, manufacture, and consumption―mediated and produced particular ways of experiencing, perceiving, and representing time. As such, Time and Material Culture turns a new page in the study of the temporal and material culture of Soviet socialism and, in doing so, contributes to broader debates on the changing experiences of time in the global twentieth century. The book integrates interdisciplinary perspectives as well as regional approaches sensitive to the multinational nature of the Soviet project.

Time and Material Culture will be useful to academics, upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students interested in twentieth-century cultures of time.

Julie Deschepper is an Assistant Professor in Heritage and Museum Studies at Utrecht University. She specialises in the material culture of socialism, with a focus on Soviet monumental heritage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Antony Kalashnikov is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo. He works on Soviet understandings of futurity. His monograph, Monuments for Posterity: Self-Commemoration and the Stalinist Culture of Time, came out in 2023.

Federica Rossi is an Assistant Professor in the History of Architecture at Iuav University of Venice, and a Research Associate at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and Università della Svizzera Italiana. She works on Russian and Soviet art, architecture and culture.