Maria Engström is Professor of Russian at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on Russian neoconservative intellectual milieu, imperial aesthetics in contemporary literature and art, late Soviet underground culture, post-Soviet utopian imagination, and the role of the Orthodox Church in contemporary Russian politics. She co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture, Oxford University Press (2023) and Digital Orthodoxy: Mediating Post-Secularity in Russia (2015). Engström’s publications include articles ‘Re-imagining antiquity: The conservative discourse of ‘Russia as the true Europe’ and Kremlin’s new cultural policy’ (2020), ‘Visualizing the Conservative Revolution: Alternative Globalization and Aesthetic Utopia of ‘Novorossiia’’ (2018), and 'Contemporary Russian Messianism and New Russian Foreign Policy' (2014). Her current project ‘No(w)stalgia of Modernity: Neo-Soviet Myth in Contemporary Russian Culture’ (2021-2024) is supported by the Swedish Research Council.