Samuel Proffitt Driver

Samuel Proffitt Driver is a scholar of visual culture whose research examines photography's role in truth-making and world-building in the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia, and Ukraine. His work encompasses Soviet nonconformist art and the history of visual manipulation, from Stalinist-era photography to AI and Russia’s information war against Ukraine. Currently the Schmidt Sciences AI & the Humanities Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Digital Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Samuel’s project, "'Seeing' the Archive: Computer Vision, Image Manipulation, and Visual Ideologies," extends the framework developed in his Soviet and post-Soviet research across global image cultures. Bringing together art history, cultural studies, and computational methods, the project uses computer vision to trace historical manipulation across the Met's photographic holdings while treating the models themselves as objects of interpretation.

Samuel completed his Ph.D. in Slavic Studies at Brown University in 2024, where his dissertation received the Dr. Pranas A. Sveikauskas Dissertation Award. He has since held a Regional Faculty Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania's Wolf Humanities Center while serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Dickinson College. Alongside his position at the Met, he remains a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown. His research has been supported by a variety of fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and he has held visiting positions at Charles University (Prague), the Open Society Archives (Budapest), the Museum of Modern Art–Thessaloniki, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Beyond academia, Samuel serves on the Executive Committee and as Co-Chair of the Information Working Group of the Younger Generation Leaders Network on Euro-Atlantic Security (European Leadership Network), connecting his scholarship with contemporary policy debates. He is also a Russian-English translator of nonfiction and poetry and a professional musician.