Masha Salazkina, PhD, is a professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montréal.
In June 2024, she was a Mercator Fellow at the research programme and gave the lecture From Socialist Screens to Global Pop: Unearthing Alternative Narratives.

Masha Salazkina’s work incorporates transnational approaches to film theory and cultural history with a focus on the historical relationship between the Socialist bloc and countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Her first book In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (University of Chicago Press, 2009) positions Eisenstein’s unfinished Mexican project and theoretical writings within the wider context of post-revolutionary Mexico and global cultures of modernity.

Her new book, World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities and Solidarities in the Global Cold War came out with California University Press in 2023. Through its analysis of the history and the programming of the Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the book argues for socialist cinema in the 1960s-1980s as a global phenomenon whose cultural and geopolitical networks extended across the three continents.

Dr Salazkina has published essays in Cinema Journal, Film History, October, Screen, Framework, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and many edited collections on such topics as the geopolitics of film and media theory production; theorizations of World Cinema; history of film education; cinemas of solidarity and internationalism. She also co-edited Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (2015) and Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures(2022, both from Indiana University Press).

Her current research projects center on the reception of Latin American popular media in the Soviet bloc in the 1970s-1980s, and the shared history of the circulation of popular music across the Global South and the Socialist bloc.