Smolny Beyond Borders

A Liberal Arts Initiative

Ilya Utekhin

Ph.D. in History (N.N. Miklouho-Maclay Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences)

Ilya Utekhin is an anthropologist working in anthropology of technology, medical anthropology, and in the study of talk-in-interaction. From 1996 to 2022, he taught in the Department of Anthropology, European University at St.Petersburg. He is co-curator of the Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life: Communal Living in Russia, which contains ethnographic materials on on Soviet and post-Soviet urban housing, also reflected in his monograph Essays on the Communal Everyday Life (Moscow 2001, 2004, in Russian). In 2017-20, Ilya was founder and CEO of a news aggregator service that showed two alternative agendas: official Russian media vs independent media. Ilya is the author of a number of documentary films. His recent book, Visual Anthropology: A Guide to Ethnographic Film (In Russian), is about the history of ethnographic filmmaking. His current research project has to do with the analysis of news flow and detection of bias and censorship.