Centre for Russian Studies

CRS Administrator: Ms Alexa Stewart
e-mail: a.stewart@ssees.ucl.ac.uk

The Centre for Russian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (UCL) exists to promote research and teaching on Russia, the former USSR and the Russian Empire. The primary aim of the Centre is to create a more distinct focus within the School for cultural, historical, linguistic, literary and social sciences research into Russia, past and present, and thereby to improve the environment for joint and individual research on Russia, including interdisciplinary and comparative approaches. The Centre aims also to promote knowledge and discussion of Russia in the broader academic community and with the public at large. Its activities enhance the quality of both postgraduate and undergraduate teaching and at the same time provide a 'home' for the many SSEES research and MA students with an interest in Russia.

Activities:

SSEES is the major centre for Russian studies in the UK. More than twenty full-time members of faculty -- language, literature and culture specialists, historians, social scientists -- devote all or most of their research and teaching to Russia. At the MA level, more than 50 students are taking Russian-based courses and/or writing their dissertations on a Russia-related topic and some 25 students are doing their postgraduate research on Russian and the former USSR, ranging from 17th-century icons to 20th-century poets, from Soviet cinema to post-Soviet politics. About 125 undergraduates are registered for degrees in Russian studies and combined degrees including Russian, with many more taking one or more courses with a Russian component, in particular politics, history and language. The Library's collection on Russia and the Former Soviet Union currently contains some 100,000 books and over 200 current periodicals and newspapers, making it one of the major resources for Russian studies in the United Kingdom.

The Centre's regular activities include the Post-Soviet Press Group which meets weekly during term-time. It also organises postgraduate Research Workshops as well as running seminar programmes: in 1999-2000 on 'The Re-writing of History in Russian Literature', 2000-2001: 'Death and Immortality in Russian Cultural History'; 2001-2002 : 'Russia in Time. Time in Russia'; 2002-3: series linked to the dates 1703 (the founding of St Petersburg) and 1903 (the founding of the Bolshevik party).

SSEES's Russian Cinema Research Group which organises seminars, talks and conferences on Russian and Soviet cinema, is also affiliated to the Centre for Russian Studies.

Seminar Series 2012-2013

Mondays 5.15pm - Room 433 SSEES (16 Taviton Street), London, WC1H 0BW

Autumn Term

• Monday 8 October 2012
  The Tarkovskii scholar José Manuel Mouriño presents his film The Bright Days. Notes about the Filming of Nostalghia, by Andrei Tarkovsky (60 minutes) followed by discussion [RCRG]

• Monday 22 October 2012
  Justine Waddell
  'Working on Target - A foreigner's take on Zel´dovich and Sorokin.'
  The renowned British actress talks about her starring role in Aleksandr Zel´dovich's film Mishen´ (2011) [RCRG].

• Monday 29 October 2012
  Professor Alexander Bobrov (Institute of Russian Literature, St. Petersburg)
  'The Search for Early Russian and Old Believer manuscripts in Modern Russia'

• Monday 12 November 2012
  Dr Julia Vassilieva (Monash University, Melbourne)
  "Everybody Dies But Me": Female authorship, youth culture and marginality in the New Russian Cinema [RCRG]
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP2yHA3Kkms

• Monday 12 November 2012, NB.Masaryk Room, 4th Floor, SSEES
  Dr Katja Richters (University of Erfurt, Germany)
  Launch of Dr Richters' new book, The Post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church: Politics, Culture and Greater Russia (Routledge, 2012)

• Monday 19 November 2012
  Robert Chandler (London)
  'The Kolyma Notebooks: Shalamov's Response, in Verse, to the Russian Poetic Tradition'

• Monday 26 November 2012
  Dr Anna Toropova (UCL SSEES)
  'An Inexpiable Debt: Stalinist Cinema and the Discourse of Happiness' [RCRG]

• Monday 3 December 2012
  Raisa Sidenova (Yale University)
  'Robert Flaherty and Soviet Documentary' [RCRG]

• Monday 10 December 2012
  Dr Daniel Beer (Royal Holloway, University of London)
  'The Fabrication of the Zerentui Conspiracy of 1828 and the Half-Life of the Decembrist Movement'

Spring Term

• Monday 14 January 2013, NB. Location TBC
  Professor Chester Dunning (Texas A&M University)
  'The Resurrected Tsar: New research on Ivan the Terrible's son Dmitrii'

• Monday 28 January 2013
  Dr Jeremy Hicks (Queen Mary, University of London) will present his new book First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938-1946, Pittsburgh University Press, followed by discussion. [RCRG]

• Monday 4 February 2013
  Gogol and the Gauchos
  Film screening of 'Cossacks in Argentina' (2010) and conversation with director, Federico Windhausen
  (A collaboration of the UCL Centre for Transnational History and the Russian Cinema Research Group.)

• Monday 18 February 2013
  Maria Pasholok (Oxford University)
  'Moving House: Representing Interior Spaces in Early Russian Cinema (Bauer, Barnet, Room)'. [RCRG]

• Monday 4 March 2013
  Rosie Bainbridge (Cambridge University)
  'The Role of Intertitles in Soviet Silent Film: the case of Aleksandr Granovskii's Evreiskoe schast´e (1925)' [RCRG}

• Monday 4 March 2013 NB: Room 347 Joint seminar with CEPSI
  Professor John Burgess (Pittsburgh Theological Seminary)
  'The Orthodox Church in the New Russia: A Force for Political Democratization?'

• Monday 11 March 2013
  Lida Oukaderova (Rice University, Houston)
  'The Cinematic Spaces of the Soviet Thaw: From Panoramic Vistas to Gendered Screens' [RCRG]

Previous Events:

SEMINAR SERIES 2011-12

SEMINAR SERIES 2010-11

SEMINAR SERIES 2009-10

SEMINAR SERIES 2008-09
Russian Perceptions of the World

SEMINAR SERIES 2007-08
Autumn 2007: Russian Research Work in Progress
Spring 2008: "After the Thaw, Before Glasnost': Artists and the Soviet State During Late Socialism

SEMINAR SERIES 2006-07:
In Spring 2007 the Centre for Russian Studies will run two seminar series: "Contemporary Russian Culture: Between Post-Communism and Post-Modernism" [conveners: Dr Polly Jones and Dr Maria Rubins] and "Representations of Power in Russia" [convenor: Dr Sergei Bogatyrev].

SEMINAR SERIES 2005-06:
The Reception of Russia

SEMINAR SERIES 2004-05:
PICTURING RUSSIA: IMAGES OF LAND AND PEOPLE IN RUSSIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
Speakers from inside and outside UCL explored how Russia and Russians -- the Empire, the USSR and Post-Soviet Russia -- have been depicted, imagined and discussed in the visual arts, film, literature and other media.

As a follow-up to the successful one-day workshop that took place in 2004 we also ran a mini-series on THE SOVIET UNION 1945-1964.

Seminars in 2003-4 included RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY RUSSIA and talks to mark the centenary of the death of Anton Chekhov. In addition, there were a number of research work-in-progress seminars by postgraduate students.

If your name is not already on our e-mail list and you would like to be included to receive the latest news of these and other events, please e-mail b.chatterley@ssees.ucl.ac.uk.

14-16 September 2006 - "The relaunch of the Soviet project, 1945-1964"
UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London

Convenors: Geoffrey Hosking (SSEES), Polly Jones (SSEES), Susan Morrissey (SSEES), Miriam Dobson (Sheffield), Juliane Furst (Oxford)

Recent major international conferences include 'Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives' (1998), the International Nabokov Centennial Conference (July 1999) and 'Russia in Time - Time in Russia' (July 2002). A conference to mark ten years since the demise of the USSR was held on 9-10 November 2001.

The Centre actively supports applications for research funding and fellowships/ readerships for attachment to the Centre.

The core membership of the Centre comprises full- and part-time members of SSEES teaching staff actively pursuing research and teaching on Russia, as listed below.

• Dr Robin Aizlewood: Russian philosophy; Russian poetry and verse theory; Futurism and the OBERIU; Russian language curriculum and text book design.

• Dr Sergei Bogatyrev: Cultural and political history of Muscovite Russia, 15th-17th centuries.

• Dr Lydia Buravova: Business Russian; Russian word formation; new developments in Russian vocabulary.

• Dr Philip Cavendish: Russian literature and culture; Zamiatin, Pushkin, Russian and Soviet cinema.

• Professor Pamela Davidson: Russian literature, with particular reference to modernism; Viacheslav Ivanov; the interaction of religion and culture; comparative literature.

• Professor Simon Dixon: The Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia; the Enlightenment in Russia; the reign of Catherine the Great.

• Dr Peter Duncan: Contemporary Russian politics and society. Nationalism, fragmentation and state-building in Russia; Russia's relations with its neighbours; political movements in the former Soviet Union; local politics in Russia.

• Professor Julian Graffy: Russian and Soviet cinema; Russian literature, with particular reference to the work of Nikolai Gogol´ and to the early 20th century; Russian symbolism; the Russian literary press.

• Dr Seth B. Graham: contemporary Russian culture, humour theory, Central Asian cinema, Russian language pedagogy.

• Professor Geoffrey Hosking FBA: Nation-building and state-building in Russia and the Soviet Union; the ex-Soviet Union from 1991; society, ideology and literature in the Soviet Union).

• Dr Polly Jones: Soviet cultural politics, especially late Stalinism to the end of the Thaw; Soviet visual culture; leader cults in literature and art; representations of World War II in Russian literature and culture.

• Professor Alena Ledeneva: Russian politics and society; BLAT.

• Dr Svetlana Makarova: comparative economics

• Professor Emeritus Arnold McMillin: Russian and Belarusian literature; contemporary Russian and émigré prose; Russian music.

• Dr Svetlana McMillin: Modern Russian literature.

• Dr Susan Morrissey: Social identity and the dynamics of political and cultural change in early 20th-century Russia; the history of suicide in Russia.

• Dr Eugene Nivorozhkin: corporate finance, labour markets, banking and financial regulation.

• Professor Slavo Radošević: Industrial and corporate change in Russia; the Russian science and technology system; foreign direct investment in Russia.

• Dr Kristin Roth-Ey: 20th century Russia and the Soviet Union; mass media; cultural production.

• Dr Maria Rubins: Russian émigré literature; Franco-Russian literary relations; 20th c. Russian literature; the Silver Age in Russian culture.

• Professor Emeritus Alan Smith: East European Economics. International trade and external economic relations of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and the CIS; Russian foreign trade; the progress of economic transition in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

• Professor Emeritus Faith Wigzell: Russian folklore and popular culture, especially fortune telling; Pre-Petrine Russian literature; the impact of native Russian traditions on modern Russian literature; Nikolai Leskov.

• Dr Andrew Wilson: Ukrainian politcs, history and culture; national identities and nationalisms in the former USSR; the interraction of Ukrainian and Russian national identity; geopolitics of the former Soviet bloc.

• Dr Sarah Young: nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, thought and culture.

In addition, all MPhil/PhD students whose chosen fields for examination concern Russia are affiliated to the Centre, together with Honorary Visiting Fellows and other visiting scholars with Russian interests. Academic staff in other University of London colleges with a strong research and/or teaching interest in Russia are invited to become Associate members.

• Clare Griffin
• Mark Griffiths
• Elizabeth (Ellie) Harrison
• Elena Kravchenko
• Simon Pawley
• James Rann
• Claire Shaw
• Zbigniew Wojnowski

This page last modified Tuesday 26 February 2013.