Dr Marie Collier

Dr Marie Collier specialises in the history of modernist Soviet and European architecture and particularly on the representation of Soviet architecture and infrastructure in mass media during the Stalinist era.
She was awarded her PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2016 for her dissertation titled ‘Visualising Socialist Construction: Soviet Architectural Photographs in Mass Printed Media c. 1928-1935’. For the 2018 academic year she was Teaching Associate in the History of Art Department at Cambridge. In 2017 she was the Sackler Research Forum Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld, where she organised the international conference Fantasy In Reality: Architecture, Representation, Reproduction.

While completing her PhD Dr Collier was Research Assistant for the V&A Engineering Season which included the first retrospective exhibition on the life and work of the Danish engineer Ove Arup as well as a new architectural commission, the Elytra Filament Pavilion, for the John Madejski Garden at the museum.

She has taught courses on subjects ranging from modern and postmodern architecture and design to the history of museums and critical theory. At Cambridge she will be teaching a special subject on the development of modernism in Russian art and it's connections with Europe.

Her current research focuses on the visual representation of architecture in the Soviet Union and Northern Europe in the 1920s to 50s, connections between British and Soviet architecture, and the integration of architecture into the everyday through mass media and mass produced objects.