Samuel Proffitt Driver is a scholar of photography, visual manipulation, and knowledge formation, specializing in Soviet and post-Soviet visual culture. His research challenges the assumption that only emerging technologies can help us understand, and combat, emerging technologies of visual manipulation — positioning classical and emerging manipulation techniques, from Stalinist photographic doctoring to Russia’s ongoing information war against Ukraine, as continuations of a longer history of contestation over the epistemic power of the photographic image.
Samuel holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Studies from Brown University and, beginning in September 2026, will serve as a Schmidt Sciences Postdoctoral Research Scholar in AI & Humanities at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Brown University, having recently completed a Regional Faculty Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center. Within YGLN, he serves on the Executive Committee and as Co-Chair of the Information Working Group, connecting scholarship on visual culture and disinformation with policy discussions on Euro-Atlantic security. He is also an active Russian-English translator of non-fiction and poetry.