Dr Antonina Puchkovskaia is a cultural historian specialising in digital humanities methods and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). She joined the Department of Digital Humanities in 2022 as Lecturer in Digital Humanities and has since taken up her current post as Lecturer in Digital Products & Industries.

Prior to joining King's, she was Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, where she founded and led the Digital Humanities Centre. She completed her PhD at Saint Petersburg State University in 2016 and held the Willard McCarty Fellowship at King's College London in 2018-2019.

Her research applies computational methods to cultural history, with a particular focus on network analysis and feminist digital humanities approaches to recovering marginalised narratives. She is also interested in developing methodologies that enable cultural institutions to enhance the accessibility of their collections by combining traditional archival scholarship with contemporary service design principles.

She is currently working on a co-authored monograph, Remapping Musicology: Marion Scott and Network Analysis, under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Her current research explores creative women and music leadership in early twentieth-century London through collaboration with the Royal College of Music. Using social network analysis, the project maps female networks in London's music scene between 1900 and 1950, revealing how women navigated professional barriers and established alternative spaces for artistic leadership.

Alongside this, she is working on a comparative study of the periodicals produced by the early women's colleges at King's, Oxford, and Cambridge. Drawing on a corpus of women's college magazines from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the project applies thematic analysis and topic modelling to examine the collective identity of women's intellectual communities, tracing the emergence of women's voice and agency across the higher education institutions of the period.

She welcomes doctoral supervision in computational approaches to cultural history, with particular interests in:

• Feminist digital humanities
• Women's intellectual and cultural history
• Social network analysis
• Thematic analysis
• Topic modelling
• Cultural heritage data representation

She especially encourages projects that combine computational methodologies with archival research to recover and reinterpret marginalised histories. To enquire about her supervision availability, potential applicants should email her a draft PhD proposal of no more than 1500 words and a short CV.

Teaching

Dr Puchkovskaia convenes research-led modules across digital humanities, user-centred research, digital collections development, digital storytelling, and the representation of cultural heritage data.

In 2025, she was among the first recipients of the King's COLLAB! Curriculum Change Projects funding, a student-staff initiative supported by King's Academy. Alongside students, she co-created a Project Manager Toolkit designed particularly for project-based modules to enhance group work.

Expertise and public engagement

Dr Puchkovskaia has delivered public lectures at universities including Oxford, Princeton, NYU, and Glasgow, where she addresses computational approaches to cultural heritage. Her workshops introduce wider audiences to methods such as social network analysis, heritage data visualisation, and computational text analysis.

In 2025, she was awarded Arts & Humanities Research Culture grant to support culture change around user experience, fostering collaboration and community across King's and beyond.

She has also contributed to the Governance Working Group of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association, where she played an active role in shaping its governance proposal and strengthening the community's collective voice.