Frances Saddington | University of East Anglia

The first year of my CHASE studentship has been full of exciting opportunities. I made trips abroad to visit archive collections of primary source materials. The first was to the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (Netherlands) to view an extensive collection of picture books and early Soviet propaganda albums. The second visit was to the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University to look at a world-renowned collection of children’s books and magazines. For this trip I was privileged to receive a research grant from the Friends of Princeton University Library. I presented a paper at the annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies in Cambridge, which enabled me to gain specialist feedback on my work. I also had the chance to share my research with a wider audience by working as Research Associate on an exhibition of Soviet picture books at House of Illustration gallery in London. I gained valuable experience of the process of staging an exhibition, working with the curator to select and interpret pieces and to develop the texts to accompany the works.