Ilia Utekhin (also Ilya Utekhin) is a Russian anthropologist and professor, primarily affiliated with the European University at St. Petersburg (EUSP), where he has held positions since 1996 to 2022, including Head of the Department of Anthropology. His research is interdisciplinary and spans across several areas, such as visual anthropology, social history of Soviet and post-Soviet society, anthropology of technology and the study of propaganda and censorship in today's Russian media landscape. 

Ilia is known for his monograph Essays on the Communal Everyday Life, which explores life in Soviet communal apartments; he is co-curator of the Virtual Museum of Soviet Everyday Life (kommunalka.colgate.edu). 

Recent research addresses bias and censorship in Russian news media, using data science and NLP methods to analyze news flow and agenda-setting in polarized media environments. Ilia has taught a wide range of courses, including: Introduction to Digital Humanities; Methods of Ethnographic Fieldwork; Analysis of Communicative Interaction; Visual Anthropology. At School of Culture and Society he will teach courses connected with the study of post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe.