Research

The Department of Russian at Bristol ranks as one of the UK's leading centres for research in Russian Studies. Founded in 1963, the department's research initially focused primarily on Russian literature. Nowadays, the department's traditional strength in literature is complemented with research on areas such as film, media, cultural and intellectual history, religious culture and gender studies.

Key research areas

Our research covers language, culture and society in Russia and the Russophone world from the 18th century to the present. Our staff have a diverse range of interest and expertise, but are united by a commitment to innovative, interdisciplinary research at the cutting edge of Russian Studies.

Our academic staff have particular expertise in the following fields:

• Russian literature from the 18th century to the present
• Russian intellectual history from the 18th century to the 20th century
• Soviet film and visual culture
• Soviet history
• Stalinist culture and the Stalin cult
• British-Soviet wartime relations (1941-45)
• British-Soviet relations 
• Literary and cultural theory
• Issues of cultural identity (perceptions of space, time, and modernity)
• Urban studies
• Russian Orthodox theology and culture
• Gender and sexuality in Russian literature and culture
• Translation studies
• Media studies
• Material culture in the Imperial Period
• Medicine and the body in literature and visual culture
• Late 19th- and early 20th-century Czech literature and visual culture

Current and recent projects

• Imperial Urban Palimpsests and Afterlives, led by Professor Andreas Schönle, explores the ways the Russian empire used the built environment as a strategy for colonial conquest and traces the afterlives of colonial heritage, asking how specific buildings and monuments were appropriated, converted, destroyed and/or rebuilt.
• Stalin’s Final Films, Dr Claire Knight's recent monograph, examines what these oft-neglected war films, rural comedies and Stalin epics can tell us about the Soviet regime, the legacy of war and the postwar crisis in socialist realism during Stalin's final years (1945-53).
• The "Russia Craze" in WWII British Wartime Media, from newspapers to radio, film to home-grown propaganda campaigns, and Britain's love affair with the Soviet ally, is Dr Knight's current project. 
• Orthodox Women and the 20th-Century Dissemination of Orthodox Spiritual Values in Great Britain, Dr Ruth Coates' current project, uncovers the neglected role of women in the history of the reception of Orthodox Christianity in Britain. 
• Orthodox Women in the Transnational Orthodox World, in development by Dr Ruth Coates with Dr Carrie Frederick Frost (Western Washington University), is designed to capture how female Orthodox in minority Orthodox societies negotiate the boundaries between their religious, ethnic and societal identities.
• Transnational Russian Studies, a research project to extend the map of Russian Studies beyond Russia, led by academics from the Universities of Bristol, Durham, and Manchester. This resulted in an edited volume, Transnational Russian Studies, co-edited by Professor Andy Byford (Durham), Dr Connor Doak (Bristol) and Professor Stephen Hutchings (Manchester) (Liverpool University Press, 2020). They subsequently co-edited a special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies, 'Russian Studies at the Crossroads' (2024), reflecting on the relevance of the transnational in light of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the decolonial turn in the field.
• Bodies in War: Ukraine and Russia, a project co-led by Dr Connor Doak and Professor Jenny Kaminer (University of California-Davis) to examine the cultural representation of the body in literary and cinematic depictions of war, 1991-present.
• Cracking the Dress Code (Dr Daniel Green) investigates the relationship between dress and literary culture in the early to mid 19th-century.
• Cures for Modernity, Dr Julia Sutton-Mattocks' recent monograph, takes the Russian and Czech literary and cinematic contexts as a case study through which to explore the interwar cultural scene's fascination with imagery and narratives of medicine and medical treatment.
• Homo/sexuality, Intimacy and Public Health: The HIV Epidemic in the Late Soviet Union (Dr Irina Roldugina, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow)

Collaborations and activities

Research staff in Russian studies have been involved in the following initiatives at Bristol:

• The Bristol Poetry Institute. In 2025 the Institute sponsored 'Poetic Ecosystems: Voice, Identity and Performance', a conference organised by Bristol research postgraduates, including our own Matilda Hicklin and Francesca Zuccaro.
• The Gender Research Centre which promotes research into gender issues across the University.
• The Screen Research Group, an interdisciplinary group of academics across the University working on film, television, and digital media.

Our staff present regularly at academic conferences and frequently give invited talks and workshops. We are actively involved in collaborations with other universities and scholarly organisations. For example:

• Dr Connor Doak sits on the Advistory Council of the Institute of Languages, Cultures, and Societies, part of the School of Advanced Studies of London.
• Dr Connor Doak is the UK representative for the International Dostoevsky Society.
• Dr Claire Knight is a member of the Russian Cinema Research Group at University College London.
• Professor Andreas Schönle is a Fellow of the British Academy and is active on fellowship selection committees.
• Dr Julia Sutton-Mattocks is a member of the steering group for the BASEES Forum for Czech and Slovak Studies in the UK.

Beyond academia, we work regularly with partners in the cultural sector, the media and publishing. We have recently worked with the BBC, Kino Klassika Foundation, the Oxford Character Project and Pushkin House. We have partnered with cultural organisations in Bristol and the southwest, including Bristol’s Watershed Cinema and the Exeter Phoenix.

Research postgraduates

In recent years Russian at Bristol has been highly successful at attracting research postgraduates, many of whom are on scholarships. Our current PhD students are:

• Suzanne Eade-Roberts: 'A History of Soviet Translation Theory'
• Matilda Hicklin: 'Towards Feminist Post-Editing? Voice, Embodiment and Visibility in the Post-Editing of Contemporary Russian Feminist Poetry'
• Francesca Zuccaro: 'Contested Feminisms in Soviet, Post-Soviet and Contemporary Russian Translations of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, 1976-2010'
• Ivana Sirinic: 'The Corporeality of Mourning in Post-Soviet Women's Prose'
• Caroline Bassnett: 'Medical Maladies, Ideological Ills: Blood and the Body in the Bolshevik Utopian Project'