Department of Slavonic Studies

Department of Slavonic Studies

My research focuses on Soviet culture of the 1920s and 1930s, with a particular emphasis on cinema. I have a strong interest in comparative literature and culture, and teach on the Faculty's two cross-departmental comparative papers, as well as for the Screen Media MPhil. My current long-term research project is a cultural history of the senses in Soviet Russia, with a particular focus on Touch. This research situates filmic texts alongside a wide range of other media, to trace the evolution of competing models of Soviet 'sensibility' in diverse fields (clothing, home decoration, aesthetic theory). I have supervised research students in diverse fields within 20th century culture (including contemporary literature, Soviet cinema, Soviet Rock music).

Principal Publications:

Books:



Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (Yale University Press, 2003)

Alexander Medvedkin (IB Tauris, 2004)

(with Simon Franklin) ed., National Identity in Russian Culture (CUP, 2004)

Selected articles:



Faktura: depth and surface in early Soviet set design, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 3: 1., pp. 5-32.

Sew Yourself Soviet: The Pleasures of Texture in the Machine Age, in: Petrified Utopia, edited by Evgenii Dobrenko and Marina Balina (Anthem Press, 2009)

Dressing the Part: Clothing Otherness in Soviet Cinema before 1953, in: Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema, Ed. Stephen Norris and Zara Torlone (Indiana University Press, 2008) [published in Russian as Kostium, predopredelennyi rol'iu: oblachenie ''drugogo'' v sovetskom kinematografe do 1053 goda, Teoriia mody: odezhda, telo, kul'tura, Spring 2007

Muratova's Clothes, Muratova's Textures, Muratova's Skin. KinoKultura 8 (April 2005). [Online journal, ISSN 1478-6567]

Sensational: The Electrified Spaces of Platonov's Screenplays, Essays in Poetics. Andrei Platonov Special Issue Vol. II. Autumn 2002

The Accordion, in Russian Visual Documents: A Reader, edited by Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (Yale University Press, 2007)

Viewed from Below: Subverting the Myths of the Soviet Landscape, in Birgit Beumers. ed., Russia on Reels: Russian Cinema in the 1990s (IB Tauris, 1999), 66-75