Before beginning as a Lecturer in Modern Eurasian History at UCL, Philippa was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Laureate Research Programme in International History at the University of Sydney. She is currently Co-Investigator (with Julia Laite of Birkbeck) on the AHRC project ‘Trafficking, Smuggling and Illicit Migration in Gendered and Historical Context’, and a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Fellow for the project ‘Russia’s Global Legal Trajectories: International Law in Eurasia Past and Present.’
Philippa is a cultural, social and legal historian of Russia in the world, with a focus on gender and sexuality, humanitarianism, international law, and migration. She also maintains research foci on feminist and queer theory and the cultural and intellectual history of the fin-de-siècle. At present she is finishing a book on the emergence of trafficking in women as a site of cultural anxiety and focus of criminal prohibition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entitled Circulating Subjects: The Traffic in Women and the Russian Construction of an International Crime. Building on research conducted in fourteen archives across Russia, Ukraine, the UK, USA, Switzerland, Latvia, Lithuania and Australia, it links the framing of trafficking as an international sexual crime to the development of international law, migratory regimes, and inter-imperial governance.
Keywords: women; gender and sexuality; international law; migration and refugees; humanitarianism; empires and decolonization; socialism and communism