Simon Huxtable

Profile

I am a global historian whose work focuses on the histories of health, mass media and international organizations with an emphasis on Eastern Europe. Before coming to Leeds I was an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths (2018-2020) and Birkbeck (2021-2022). Most recently, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Wellcome-funded Connecting Three Worlds at Birkbeck.

I am the author of News From Moscow: Soviet Journalism and the Limits of Postwar Reform (Oxford University Press, 2022), a social and cultural history of Soviet journalism after World War II which explores how journalists at the youth newspaper Komsomol'skaia pravda negotiated a quarter of a century of intense change after World War II. In 2023, the book was nominated for the Gladstone Prize for best first monograph by the Royal Historical Society.

I was also co-author of From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which explores the transformations of time and space engendered by television in the post-war Soviet Union, GDR, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia.

Research interests

I am currently part of the Wellcome-funded the Soviet Union, the WHO and Global Health project. My research focuses on the Soviet and post-Soviet response to HIV/AIDS, exploring the role of Soviet experts within the WHO, as well as transnational contacts between activists in the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States.

In the past, my research has focused on the history of global media. In 2024-25, I received funding from the Gerda Henkel Foundation for a project which explored how the idea of fredom of information was understood in colonial and post-colonial media development projects from the 1940s to the 1980s.

Qualifications

• PhD History
• MA in Social and Cultural History
• BA in History
• Advance HE Fellow

Professional memberships

• BASEES
• ASEEES