Pauline Fairclough is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol, and a specialist in Soviet musical culture, particularly the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Her biography of Shostakovich was published in 2019 and her study of Western classical music's appropriation in the Soviet Union, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity Under Lenin and Stalin (2016) was co-winner of the Women's Forum history prize of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (2017).