Simon M Weppel

My PhD project at Cambridge will analyse the changes which heritage sites connected to the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin have gone through since the fall of the Soviet Union. It will do so in various different cultural-geographical contexts - from a museum-village in remote Siberia to Lenin's dacha near the centre of power in Moscow. Employing approaches from heritage studies, anthropology, and temporal philosophy, it will question the nature of historical personality and its representation in socialist and postsocialist contexts. This research builds on work carried out for my MPhil dissertation at Cambridge, which analysed the heritage landscape of Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin (born Ulyanov), and traced changes in meaning and significance of Soviet-era heritage sites for the local population.

Before coming to Cambridge, I studied Archaeology and History at the Free University of Berlin and Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.