![Professor Andreas Schonle](https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/files/289128945/picture_505_1432155124.jpg)
Professor Andreas Schonle
PhD, MA
Current positions
Professor
Department of Russian
Contact
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Biography
I completed an undergraduate degree in Russian and German at the University of Geneva, spending a year in the Soviet Union as part of it. In the absence of any opportunities for doing a funded PhD in Geneva, I decided to try my luck elsewhere and was offered a scholarship to do an MA and then PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. This was a transformative experience for me. Having completed my PhD in 1995, I landed a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, where I taught mostly eighteenth and nineteenth-century Russian literature, as well as cultural theory. I was then promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, but after 9/11, my wife and I began to feel that it was time to return to Europe. I took a position as Professor of Russian at Queen Mary, University of London in 2005. This, too, was a transformative experience, and we thoroughly enjoyed living in London. Ever ready for new adventures, I joined the University of Bristol in 2018 as head of the School of Modern Languages, a huge privilege given that this is one of the top language schools in the UK. I very much enjoy working with a wonderful team of dynamic and creative colleagues.
Research interests
My main research interests since the beginning of my career have centred around the cultural and ideological construction of time and space in Russia since the eighteenth century. This interest emerged out of my first book, which was on Russian travel literature between 1790 and 1840 and my second book, which dealt with the political and social “import” of landscape design in imperial Russia. These two research projects illustrated vividly how the design, perception, and interpretation of space are entangled with ideas about national identity and reflect a specific kind of historical and ideological consciousness. To broaden these concerns, I began to explore the historical consciousness of various social groups from different vantage points, while still retaining a specific interest in the construction of time and space.
I developed three different research strands — on the perception of ruins, on the subjective and cultural dimensions of Europeanization, and on the construction of time. The first led to a book called Architecture of Oblivion: Ruins and Historical Consciousness in Modern Russia (2011), in which I explore the way ruins have been treated and mistreated over the course of Russia’s history and their significance for various communities and subcultures. I continue to be interested in several aspects of urban studies, in particular in view of Moscow’s breath-taking development in recent decades.
The second research strand has led to a collaborative project (with Andrei Zorin) on the self-invention of the Russian elite in the eighteenth-early nineteenth century, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Here we looked at the hybrid, fluid, and ambivalent emotional and cognitive world of the elite as it rapidly Europeanized itself, while retaining a distinct sense of its Russian identity. This paradigm of self-westernization of a country on the periphery of Europe presents an interesting alternative to the colonial processes that have received much attention in recent scholarship. This project has led to a collective volume and to a co-authored monograph titled On the Periphery of Europe, 1762-1825: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite (forthcoming 2018). Writing this book strengthened my interest in Transnational Studies, a line of inquiry I am now actively pursuing.
Finally, my interest in the construction of time leads me into my new project, which I provisionally call a History of Russian Time, in which I propose to conceptualize the co-existence of plural temporalities in Russia, as seen in a broad cross-cultural context.
Projects and supervisions
Thesis supervisions
Publications
Recent publications
11/03/2021Exile as emotional, moral and ideological ambivalence
Redefining Russian Literary Diaspora, 1920-2020
Lotman and New Historicism
The Companion to Juri Lotman
Эмоциональная, моральная и идеологическая амбивалентность изгнания: Николай Тургенев и перформанс политической эмиграции
Tраектории чтения литературы русской диаспоры (1920 — 2020)
Calendar Reform under Peter the Great
Slavic Review
Appropriating Stalinist heritage: state rhetoric and urban transformation in the repurposing of VDNKh
Re-Centring the City