Rosalind Polly Blakesley

Rosalind Polly Blakesley ( Gray) is a prize-winning author, art historian and academic, and the current Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. She has taught art history at the University of Cambridge, been a Fellow of Pembroke College since 2002, and a Professor of Russian and European Art since 2018. She previously worked at The Queen's College, Oxford, the Russian Institute of Art History, Newcastle University, and the University of Kent.

Academic career Blakesley is Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and co-founder of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre. A syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Trustee of the Samuel Courtauld Trust, and former Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in London, she has curated exhibitions in Britain, Russia and the US, including Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky at the National Portrait Gallery in 2016.

Blakesley's most recent book, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia 1757-1881, was awarded the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize, the Art Newspaper Russia Best Book Award, and Honourable Mention from the Heldt Prize Committee for Best Book by a Woman in Slavic Studies. In 2020, her book on Catherine the Great was shortlisted for the Apollo Magazine book of the year award.

Personal life In 2001, Rosalind Gray married Patrick James Blakesley, Together they have two children.

Selected publications Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford, 2000. (Oxford Historical Monographs) (under her maiden name of Rosalind P. Gray) An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum. London, 2003. (co-editor and contributor) The Arts and Crafts Movement. London, 2006. Russian Art and the West: a Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts. DeKalb, Ill., 2007. (co-editor and contributor) From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture. DeKalb, Ill., 2014. (co-editor and contributor) The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1878. New Haven and London, 2016.