Current Postgraduate Students
Jill Bates - PhD
Thesis Title: Shakespeare in Russia
Thesis Description: My research stems from an interest in theatre translation and the issues encountered when plays are performed in a different language and culture to that of the original script.
Focusing on the translation history of Shakespeare in Russia, my aim is to use modern translation theory to analyse the different strategies employed by translators over time, and how these translation decisions reflect the social and political conditions of their day. I also intend to examine the contrasts in translation tactics between those texts intended to be read and those intended for performance, and whether working with the plays in translation grants foreign directors a greater freedom of expression compared to those working with the canonised originals.
I hope to reach conclusions regarding the different purposes to which Shakespeare is put within Russian society and culture, and how the translation decisions taken have shaped the texts in order to meet the ideological demands of their time.
Sean Jinks - PhD
Thesis Title: Depressed in an Age of Reason: Mikhail Zoshchenko and Post-Revolutionary Melancholia
Thesis Description: This study attempts a unified reading of the formally disparate works of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958) by focussing on the theme of melancholia. In an approach which follows on from Alexander Zholkovsky’s ground-breaking work on Zoshchenko, it seeks to read the explicit melancholic concerns of the writer’s later works (especially Before Sunrise) back into his comic stories of the twenties to reveal a melancholy aesthetic extending across the Zoshchenko oeuvre. The study then attempts to read these recurring melancholic concerns as a language of melancholia appropriate to Soviet cultural possibilities which is hugely revealing of both the system that shaped it, and the modes of selfhood that this system engendered.
Other Research Interests: My MA research focused on analysing Zoshchenko’s textual engagement with Petersburg which has resulted in a continuing interest in the Petersburg text and the cultural history of the city.
Doug Nairn - MA by Research
Thesis Title: ‘Investigating the negative impact of long-distance travel on character’s relationships in Vladimir Nabokov’s English language novels.’
Thesis summary: Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov is widely recognised as one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists. He is best known for Lolita, which follows a stepfather’s affection for his pre-pubescent stepdaughter, and their journey across 1960s America. Lolita paints a provocative portrait of illicit love and betrayal, but importantly it also reveals a glimpse of Nabokov’s America as seen in his rear-view mirror.
Nabokov left Russia at the age of 19 and never returned. He lived in England, Germany, France, and America and retired to Switzerland at the height of his fame. Travel shaped Nabokov’s life and career. My aim is to decipher the role it plays in his fiction. A recurrent theme in Nabokov’s writing is long-distance travel causing breakdowns in character relationships. This topic has not been covered by previous scholars, so I hope to make a real contribution to Nabokov studies with my 40,000 word thesis.
Other research interests: A personal fascination of mine is Senator Robert Kennedy and his brother JFK’s reign as President. In the Russian department, I have focused on literary giants like Bulgakov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Lyndsay Miller - PhD
Proposed thesis title: Artistic revisionism in the works of Vladimir Nabokov
Thesis description: My research investigates the proposition that there are two divergent strains of artistic revisionism within the works of Vladimir Nabokov, which lead at all times forwards and backwards to Nabokov’s masterpieces, Lolita and Pale Fire.
Emilie Murphy - PhD
Thesis Title: Genre, Gender and Identity in Russian Women's Francophone Life-Writing (1777-1830)
Thesis Description: Following the Enlightenment and ever closer cultural links with France, in many cases French became the dominant written and spoken language of Russian noblewomen due to the French-language education they received and social norms requiring the use of the French. Russian noblewomen often penned their life-writings, including travel texts, in French and, for the most part, these writings took epistolary or diurnal form and remained unpublished. I intend to examine the specific nature of Russian noblewomen’s francophonie in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Russia and with reference to female travel theory and criticism, to investigate the intersection of genre with gender and identity. With the aim of incorporating the study of previously unknown manuscripts into my work I believe that some kind of comparison between published and unpublished texts would be revealing in as far as generic features are concerned and would sharpen our understanding of the ways in which travel writing was produced, read and circulated in the long eighteenth century in Russia.
Aleksander Pavlovic - PhD
Thesis Title: The Politics of Serbian Epic Poetry
Thesis Description: The first collections of Serbian oral folk epic poetry were published in the first half of the 19th century, corresponding with the process of national emancipation and liberation. In this thesis, I analyze how this process of political subjectivization was manifested in Serbian epic poetry. The study follows how initial ethnic and religious ambiguity and the domination of local or territorial identification, documented in the earlier recordings, transforms into a unified national narrative against the Turks as the universal political enemy in the published collections. It is argued that the representation of the oral folk epic tradition was under the constant influence of the political leaders and the collectors themselves. Accordingly, the majority of the songs presenting a unified perspective were articulated or inspired by the political leaders, and then privileged in the early publications because of their correspondence with the political ideas of the first collectors.
Other Research Interests: Literary theory, cultural studies, political philosophy, ethnography and history of the Balkans.