Aileen Kelly

Aileen Kelly is a historian specialising in the history of ideas, and in Russian intellectual history in particular. She taught in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of King’s College there. She is the author of the books Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Politics and Psychology of Utopianism (1982), Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance (1998) and Views from the Other Shore: Essays on Herzen, Chekhov and Bakhtin (1999), and has been a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. In 2016, she published the monumental biography The Discovery of Chance. The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen.