Pauline Fairclough. A cultural historian specializing in Soviet music, she is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol. Her first book, A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (2006) was an in-depth study of Shostakovich's symphonic masterpiece, which had to wait twenty-five years for its post-Stalin era premiere. For Classics for the Masses (2016), her second monograph, she was a co-winner of the BASEES Women's Forum Book Award in 2018. She has been the editor of three The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (with David Fanning, Cambridge University Press, 2008), Shostakovich Studies 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Twentieth Century Music and Politics: Essays in memory of Neil Edmunds (Ashgate, 2012).

She is Vice President-elect of the Royal Musical Association, co-editor of CUP Twentieth-Century Music magazine, editor of Routledge's Russian and Eastern European music series, and is on the editorial board of the Moscow magazine Iskusstvo muzïki. Theory and history. Together with Olga Digonskaya (Shostakovich Archive in Moscow), he directs the study group "Shostakovich and his Epoch" of the International Musicological Society and is a member of the Study Group of Russian and Eastern European Music of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies.