I am currently Lecturer in Modern Eurasian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where I research and teach the cultural, social and legal history of imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union in transnational context.  I also work in the fields of comparative legal history, feminist and queer theory, and the cultural and intellectual history of the fin-de-siècle.  This constellation of interests led me to the topic of my current book manuscript Circulating Subjects: The Traffic in Women and the Russian Invention of an International Crime.  This book draws on the dissertation I wrote for my PhD, completed in May 2014 at Harvard University. Building on research conducted in fourteen archives across Moscow, St Petersburg, Odessa, Geneva and London, it examines the emergence of 'trafficking in women' as a specific crime in turn of the century Russia, and links this to the development of international humanitarian law, migratory regimes, and imperial governance. In addition, I have written on consumer culture under Stalin, the social and legal history of prostitution in Moscow and St Petersburg since 1600, and the gendered dynamics of the interwar Russian refugee crisis.  At present, I am in the early stages of researching a new book project on the spatial imaginaries of nineteenth century legal pluralism in Russia's southern borderlands. 

After finishing my PhD, I spent a year as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laureate Research Program in International History at the University of Sydney, Australia.  While there I co-organized a conference on the international history of trafficking, part of an on-going collaboration with scholars at Birkbeck (London) and Texas State University.  Over the years, my research has been funded by fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Australian Research Council, Edward J. Safra Center for the Study of Ethics, and Harvard University. 

You can contact me at p dot hetherington at ucl dot ac dot uk; find me on Academia.edu here, and tweet me via @philippahether.