Ben Moriarty researches post-Soviet Russian history with particular interest in political economy, media, and security. Their fellowship research project is titled The Many Faces of the Moscow Metro: Architectural Mimesis and Historical Memory in Understanding Histories of Urban Russia, which examines how the Moscow Metro functioned as both transit system and bomb shelter, revealing patterns of how states repurpose civilian spaces during conflicts. Ben is one of our 2024-25 Undergraduate Fellows.
What are your main research interests and what excites you most about them?
Primarily, I am interested in the Soviet Union and its post-collapse constituent states, particularly from their post-war history up to current events. I dual-majored in History and Cinema Studies during undergraduate, so I often found myself synthesizing these disciplines to assess media as history and history as media. This thinking is how I ended up publishing my first undergraduate journal article, "Opening the Fourth Seal," which uses films about the Soviet experience in the Second World War from different political epochs to trace changes in the nation's popular conceptions of the conflict. But beyond this synthesis, I have a great passion for Eastern-European/Eurasian history, politics, and economies. Particularly more contemporary history of the region—that is, post-Soviet—is extremely exciting to me because for the most part, it doesn't quite exist yet as a field, so there's still so much to be written, analyzed and discovered. I understand at a logistical level why this temporality has yet to be tapped for research—the vast majority of historians studying the region were already in the academy during this period, so it's not really "history" to many of them, and archival access to post-Soviet states pales in comparison to that of the Soviet Union.
What project are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it?
Within the theme of underground/underworlds, the Moscow Metro was a very attractive choice as it both fit a very literal aesthetics of the theme, but its history also functions to illuminate an 'underground' in social, political and economic life in Moscow. The Metro was also my own introduction into my lifelong fascination with Eurasia and this period of transition between Soviet and post-Soviet states after reading the excellent sci-fi novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitrii Glukhovskii as a child. However, the original proposal was a sprawling project that would trace and periodize the Metro's entire, multifaceted history. As I began researching and writing it at JHI, I got extremely hung-up on the fact that the imagined purpose of the Moscow Metro as a nuclear shelter as in Glukhvoskii's novel was not fiction—the Metro was from its inception in the 1930s, a bomb shelter for Muscovites. This became the basis upon which I narrowed the scope of the project, and now Moscow's metro is a case-study for a theoretical framework I have developed of "spatial mobilization." I am attempting to articulate the latent and explicit role of physical spaces in conflict, how this changes the relationship between the body-politic and the spaces they inhabit, and what this indicates about the expanding boundaries of permissible actions by states during times of conflict.
How has your JHI Fellowship experience been?
Without a doubt it has been the highlight of my undergraduate experience at the University of Toronto. The ability to take risks and experiment in the interdisciplinary humanities has been a wonderful opportunity for academic and personal growth. I am in awe of the staff and fellows alike, the kindness and intelligence of everyone was truly astounding, and as an undergraduate the guidance and advice all were keen to provide was invaluable. The weekly lunches and research sharing were of course phenomenal experiences to expand my thinking to socialize with so many brilliant academics, but access to the JHI space was something I am so happy to have taken advantage of as the carrel was a site of immense productivity for me—not to mention free coffee!
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
Of course, the humanities are always critical, but I think our current moment is in some way a consequence of the devaluing of the humanities. I grew up under an ambient stigma of the humanities, especially at the expense of English and history—post-2016, gender studies definitely took up the mantle of the liberal-arts punchline amidst the culture-war. There was a very strong assertion the humanities were "not objective enough," and were somehow outmoded by fields like STEM. Looking back, I now understand very clearly that this was a matter of valuing innovation in production over innovation in knowledge. Decades of this devaluing has clearly taken a toll, as we have gone from "what will you do with an English degree?", to attempts at "automating" the humanities through large language models (exceedingly poorly, I might add) rather than engage critically, massive democratic backsliding across the world, or even the inability of our society to come to a consensus on what a genocide is while one is being live-streamed to our phones and televisions 24/7 from Gaza. We are in a very dangerous moment and while I have no expectation that the humanities are a direct solution to every problem we face, they would provide us with far greater tools to identify and challenge them.
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
Just the other week I was at HotDocs to see Mstyslav Chernov's second feature film, 2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025), which is a bracing piece of journalism about the failed 2023 Ukrainian Counteroffensive and the growing toll of Russia's expanded invasion. The expanded invasion has produced a very distinct aesthetic in Ukrainian documentary; the proliferation of drones and GoPro cameras fastened to the helmets or body armour of soldiers has provided an unprecedented level of access to the conflict. I have written a bit on this specific phenomenon, as this is simply another progression in the long-standing relationship between military technology and film, but the fidelity of these cameras and the ability to disseminate it so rapidly through social media is almost definitely a paradigm shift in the public relationship to war. Chernov takes this documentary footage, most often relegated to Telegram channels or heavily censored YouTube videos, and combines it with the deeply humanizing interviews and atrocity witness that comprised 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), elevating both approaches to documentary. I definitely have some qualms with the film's handling of language politics and uncritical evaluation of its subjects, but it's a tremendous piece of filmmaking. I would love to do closer analysis of it once it finishes the festival circuit and is available online.
What is a fun fact about you?
I am an avid analogue photographer! DSLR cameras were simply too expensive for me as a student, so I found myself using a second-hand Soviet rangefinder camera instead, and I completely fell in-love with the process of shooting on film, as well as the medium's rich texture and aesthetic.