Congratulations to Cinema Studies Major student, Ben Moriarty on becoming a Jackman Humanities Institute Undergraduate Fellow in 2024-25. Ben has been awarded the Zoltan Simo Undergraduate Award in the Humanities for their project, The Many Faces of the Moscow Metro: Architectural Mimesis and Historical Memory in Understanding Histories of Urban Russia.
Ben Moriarty has been a Dean’s List Scholar for each of their three years and has had an article investigating intersections of Soviet socio-political history, historical memory, and film published in the undergraduate journal, The Cyril and Methodius Review. They are an aspiring scholar of post-Soviet Russian history with particular interest in political economy, media, and security.
The Moscow Metro is among the most expansive in the world and has long served as a site of architectural mimesis for Russia. The Metro’s dark tunnels and lavish stations are inscribed with historical connotation, but themselves are sites of production for meaning in Urban Russia. Ben will seek to investigate how the Moscow Metro is a critical historical nexus, both in its own history, but also in its own ability to construct historical meaning, by analyzing the Metro’s role at various stages in Russian history, as well as its depictions in media, and historical memory.