Dr Tim Beasley-Murray

Senior Lecturer in European Thought and Culture

Email
t.beasley-murray@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Phone Number
020 7679 8731

Fax
020 7679 8722

I was born in the Congo. Later, I read Modern and Medieval Languages (Czech, German, and Russian) at Cambridge, and then spent a year at the École normale supérieure in Paris, before joining SSEES in 1996 as Lecturer in Slovak Studies. My doctoral dissertation was on conceptions of experience and form in the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin. In October 2008 I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in European Thought and Culture.

Research Interests
Aesthetics and literary theory; political philosophy; Habsburg culture and psychoanalysis; Modernism and the historical avant-gardes; Czech, Slovak and German-language literature; Postcolonialism and Central European culture.

Amongst other projects, I am currently investigating the function of speech in political thought, with reference to Arendt, Bakhtin, Hobbes, and Thucydides.

My book, Experience and Form: Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin came out with Palgrave-Macmillan in 2007.

You may read my article on 'German-language Culture and the "Slav Stranger within"', published in Central Europe.

Here is a final draft of an article, 'The Revolutionary Moment and the 'Lost Treasure' of Democracy: 1989 in the Light of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Slavoj Žižek' that appeared in Peter Duncan (ed.), Convergence and Divergence: Russia and Eastern Europe into the Twenty-First Century, Studies in Russia and Eastern Europe series. London: UCL SSEES, 2007.

For a fuller list of recent publications, please follow the link at the bottom of this page.

Teaching and Supervision
I teach and contribute to a wide variety of courses in comparative literature, political philosophy, literary theory and cultural studies, East European literature and cinema, and Slovak literature. I am also Programme tutor for the MRes in East European Studies and for the MA in Central and South-East European Studies. In July, I was given one of the Provost's Teaching Awards.

Courses:
The History of European Political Ideas (BA)
Introduction to East European Literature in Translation (BA)
Cinema in Eastern Europe (BA)
Introduction to Slovak Literature (BA)
Walter Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Politics (MA)
Alterity, Identity, Dialogue: Bakhtin and Others (MA)

Contributions to:
Language and Culture (BA)
Nationalism, Literature and Language in Eastern Europe (MA)
Contemporary Cultural Studies: Between Communism and Postmodernism (MA)

I am currently supervising four MPhil/PhD students working on:

• Spaces of memory, gender, carnival and the postcolonial in contemporary Ukrainian literature
• Anti-semitism in Czech and Russian literature of the latter half of the 19th century
• Illustration and text in the history of Karel Hynek Mácha's Máj
• Intersubjectivity and inspiration in the work of Witold Gombrowicz

Recent Publications

This page last modified Tuesday 25 May 2010.