Congratulations to incoming Mercator Fellow Masha Salazkina! Her recent monograph has been named as one of the “Chronicle of Higher Education”’s best scholarly books of 2023. As Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado writes for the „Chronicle“:

“Masha Salazkina’s World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023) defies the axioms by which world culture mirrors the world-systems of Atlantic capitalism. Through an erudite and rigorous study of the Tashkent International Festival of Cinemas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, held in the 1960s and 1970s in the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, Salazkina looks away from the usual Euro- and U.S.-centric institutions to present world cinema otherwise. Her work unveils distinct paradigms of film production in countries around the former Second and Third Worlds, through an approach that methodologically draws from the histories of media decolonization. In her words, World Socialist Cinema is ‘an invitation to travel out of our comfort zones together and to begin mapping a different conception of world cinema.’”

The book is available in open access from University of California Press.