Dr. Ella Rossman

Ella Rossman received her PhD in history from University College London, where she also taught courses in Soviet history, East European politics and gender studies. She has held research fellowships at the Institute of Historical Research of the University of London, the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, University of Oxford and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her work has been published in Gender & History, Girlhood Studies, New Perspectives, History of Science and Humanities, Ab Imperio and other journals, as well as in the edited volume Activism in Hard Times in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2024).

Ella Rossman is interested in transdisciplinary and participatory forms of knowledge production and exchange inside and beyond academia. To pursue this, she collaborates with artists, educators and civic activists across the globe. Ella has taken part in multiple civic education initiatives, including the Brīvā Universitāte and the New School of Political Science, where she taught courses and organised discussions on a wide range of topics, from critical theory and gender to new approaches to Soviet history, engaging hundreds of students outside the university system. She also took part in the experimental performance I Want a Baby!, devoted to the early emancipation of Soviet women and staged at the Meyerhold Centre, where she contributed both as a performer and as a research adviser. She actively disseminates her research through media commentary, with op-eds and interviews featured in outlets such as the BBC, NBC News, Reuters, La Repubblica, Novaya Gazeta, Meduza, The Moscow Times and others.

Ella has been a researcher at the GWZO in the department »Knowledge and Participation« since September 2025. 

• Soviet and Russian women’s history and gender history 

• History of feminism

• Feminist and queer theory 

• Feminist and queer arts and literatures

• Feminist epistemologies 

• 2020 : Best Teacher Award, National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow), choice of students of the Faculty of Humanities

• 2022 Patricia Herlihy Graduate Research Award, Association for Women in Slavic Studies 

• 2023 Aachen Peace Prize for co-founding the Feminist Anti-War Resistance collective (team award)