Dr Ben Phillips

I am an interdisciplinary historian of modern Russia with a special interest in the political, cultural and intellectual histories of the late-Tsarist period (roughly from 1861 to 1917).

My first monograph, Siberian Exile and the Invention of Revolutionary Russia, 1825-1917 (Routledge, 2021), examined the origins of Siberia's modern reputation as a place of exile, showing how the overseas circulation of this image in the years before 1917 stimulated the development of global radical networks and helped shape Western understandings of the Russian Revolution.

My current project focuses on terrorism in Russia in the years around 1905. I am interested in a series of overlapping issues: how members of revolutionary terrorist groups understood the moral and ethical implications of killing in the name of an idea, how acts of political violence were interpreted and intellectualised (both by the terrorists themselves and by contemporary observers more broadly), and in discursive connections between acts of terror and other forms of political violence (including reflexive ones such as hunger strikes and protest suicides).

I have published several articles exploring these questions: one recently appeared in a special issue of the Slavonic & East European Review, titled Political Martyrdom in Late Imperial Russia (102.1, January 2024), that I co-edited with Dr George Gilbert (University of Southampton). 

In general, I am interested in connections between the revolutionary events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the longer-term Russian cultural tradition, and how the former can be interpreted and understood in terms of the latter. 

Before coming to Exeter, I taught modern European history at Queen Mary University of London. I am co-convenor (with Dr Nicholas Hall and Dr Anna Maslenova) of the Anglo-Russian Research Network, an interdisciplinary scholarly grouping based at Exeter (in its current incarnation) since 2020. I was a member of the British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies committee for four years (2019-23).