Stephen Hutchings is Professor of Russian Studies and Director of Research in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He arrived at the University of Manchester in 2006, having worked previously at the University of Surrey, and the University of Rochester, New York. He has published five monographs and five edited volumes on various aspects of contemporary Russian literary, film, and media studies with major publishers including Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and Palgrave. His most recent books include Islam, Security and Television News (co-authored with Christopher Flood et al; London: Palgrave 2012), and Television and Culture in Putin’s Russia (co-authored with Natalia Rulyova; Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). He has held five large research grants with the Arts and Humanities Research Council since the year 2000. He was President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies from 2010 to 2013 and is currently Associate Editor of the Russian Journal of Communication. He is a frequent contributor to the media, including Radio 4’s The Today Programme and BBC Breakfast, and has advised BBC Monitoring and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Joanna Szostek is a postdoctoral fellow at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES). She received a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford in 2013. Her doctoral research shed light on the factors which shape news coverage of Russia in Ukraine and Belarus – this work has been published in East European Politics and Societies and is under review with other journals. For her postdoctoral project, she is investigating the reception of anti-Western narratives among university students in Moscow. Broadly speaking, her research interests centre on the role of the mass media in relations between states, with a particular focus on the post-Soviet region. Before entering academia, Joanna worked for several years as a senior monitoring journalist for the BBC.