Russian (Research)

The Department of Russian has an outstanding record of research. We pride ourselves on our strong, active research culture, and the research interests of staff span a broad range of disciplinary emphases.

We can support postgraduate research in many areas within the following broad fields:

• Russian and Russophone literature from the 18th century to the present;

• Russian intellectual history from the 19th century to the 20th century;

• Russian and Soviet film and visual culture;

• Soviet history;

• Stalinist culture and the Stalin cult;

• British-Soviet wartime relations (1941-45);

• Literary and cultural theory;

• Issues of cultural identity (semiotics of space, perceptions of time and of modernity);

• Transnational and decolonial approaches;

• Urban studies;

• Russian Orthodox theology and culture;

• Gender and sexuality in Russian literature and culture;

• Translation studies;

• Media studies;

• Medicine and the body in literature and visual culture;

• Late-19th and early-20th-century Czech literature and visual culture.

Recent and ongoing projects by our postgraduates include:

• The history of Soviet translation theory;

• Translatorial visibility and agency in the post-editing process through the lens of feminist translation studies;

• Contested feminisms in Soviet, Post-Soviet and contemporary Russian translations of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, 1976-2010;

• The corporeality of mourning in post-Soviet women's prose;

• Blood and the body in the Bolshevik utopian project.

Our postgraduates are a key part of the research community and are integrated into the research activities of the Department, the School of Modern Languages and the faculty.

Possible start dates are September 2026 and January 2027. Please see the programme page on our website for more information.