Ruth Coates specialises in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian intellectual history. Her research interests are in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian religious thought, Russian Orthodox theology and culture and its influence on secular Russian thought, and the work of the twentieth-century philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. 

She is the author of Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author (CUP, 1998) and co-editor of The Emancipation of Russian Christianity (Edwin Mellen, 1995) and Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium 100 Years On (Academic Studies Press, 2013).

Her most recent book, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917 (OUP, 2019) is a study of the reception of the Greek patristic doctrine of deification in late imperial Russian religious thought, with a focus on works by D. Merezhkovskii, N. Berdiaev, S. Bulgakov, and P. Florensky.

Ruth Coates has acted as primary supervisor of theses on deification in the work of Vladimir Solov'ev, the early reception of St Seraphim of Sarov, female characters in early Dostoevsky, and the reception of Dostoevsky in the 1890s.

She welcomes enquiries about potential supervision of postgraduate research projects in the following fields:

• Russian religious thought
• Russian philosophy and the history of ideas
• Russian Orthodox culture and its reception in literature and thought
• Dostoevsky
• Bakhtin