Jonathan Waterlow
I’m an author based in Edinburgh.
I have always been interested in history, and Russian history in particular. As a student I became fascinated with the ways in which ordinary Soviet people made sense of life under Stalinism. This became the subject of my PhD thesis at the University of Oxford, which I later developed into a book: It’s Only a Joke, Comrade!. This uncovers the hidden world of political jokes under Stalin’s dictatorship and explores how humour helps us to make sense of our lives.
During the research for this book, I also became interested in how the Soviets prosecuted Nazi war criminals and shaped the Nuremberg Trials. I was surprised to discover that although many different disciplines study the topic of war criminals and investigations, there was very little dialogue between them. This is why, during my postdoc, I started an interdisciplinary war crimes research network at The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities and published an edited volume on the topic.
I have written about Soviet and European history and politics for a number of academic publications, as well as for the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, The Moscow Times, and Aeon.
As a historian, I was always particularly fascinated by the ways in which ordinary people in the past coped with difficult circumstances. This sparked an interest in psychology more generally, which I went on to explore in a podcast series, Voices in the Dark, and in publications aimed at wider audiences.
As a researcher at Bristol University, I worked on the little-known history of Soviet hippies and their 1960s counterculture. As a result, I became very interested in the role psychedelics have played in different societies and the current research into their application in therapeutic settings.
I studied History at the Universities of Edinburgh, St Andrews and Oxford. Thereafter, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto, and a researcher at Bristol University. I was also a tutor and Stipendiary Lecturer at Oxford.
In 2017, I met my partner Jamie and together we founded The Island studio, a home to sought-after tattoo artists who practise their art in a calm, tranquil and nature-infused setting in the heart of Edinburgh’s dynamic Leith area.
