Rolf Hellebust
Associate Professor in Russian and Slavonic Studies, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Biography
After completing my doctoral studies with Lubomír Doležel in my hometown of Toronto in 1993, I took up a post at the University of Calgary. There I had the opportunity to teach a wide variety of subjects, including Russian language at all levels and Russian literature and culture from Ilarion to the present day. In 2007 I came to Nottingham, where I am currently lecturing in the following modules:
- Introduction to Russian History and Culture (R81009)
- Advanced Russian (R83091)
- Intermediate Russian (R83096)
- Reading and Writing the 19th-Century Russian Literary Tradition (R82094)
- The Petersburg Text (R83107)
I am the sole instructor for the last two, which are closely based on my own research. Previous teaching at Nottingham has also included The 20th-century Russian Novel (81025) and From Pushkin to Chekhov (R81003).
Research Summary
My current major project is a book on the construction of the 19th-century Russian literary canon as a cultural narrative. Publications related to this theme include an article on Turgenev for… read more
Selected Publications
Current Research
My current major project is a book on the construction of the 19th-century Russian literary canon as a cultural narrative. Publications related to this theme include an article on Turgenev for Russian Literature, one for the Slavic and East European Journal on Bakhtin and the Russian canon, and an essay on the myth of St. Petersburg for the Russian Review. I am also continuing to work on contemporary Russian culture, literary and otherwise: an example is my paper "Komar and Melamid beyond the Trans-State" for the 8th ICEESS World Congress in Stockholm, 2010.
Past Research
I wrote my MA thesis (U. of Toronto, 1988) on the modernism of James Joyce and Andrei Belyi, and defended my PhD dissertation "The Pushkinian Tradition as Narrative and Intertext" (U. of Toronto, supervisor Lubomír Doležel) in 1993. Since then I have continued to develop research interests in both the 19th and 20th centuries - and beyond, from Avvakum to Zamiatin. A recent focus has been the symbolic language of revolution in Russia, which I explored in Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Cornell, 2003).
Future Research
Upon completion of my monograph on the 19th century, I would like to focus on the theory and practice of Russian modernism and postmodernism in its international contexts, building on previous work on such figures as Belyi and Joyce, Nabokov, Bitov, and Aksenov.