Department of Slavonic Studies

Department of Slavonic Studies

Katherine Bowers's research explores the relationship between the eighteenth-century British Gothic novel and nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Her work examines the often blurry lines between generic convention and Realist innovation, tracing and analyzing the Gothic underpinnings of psychological, sociological, and political literary paradigms that appear in the late nineteenth-century Russian canon. As she argues, this imported Gothic mode had a significant impact on the way Russian writers developed their craft. Other research interests include travel narratives, women's roles in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and literary culture, urban landscape representation, poetry, cultural translation, and comparative studies, especially German, Scandinavian, and English writers in the context of Russian literary history.

Katherine received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Northwestern University. At Cambridge she is working with Prof. Simon Franklin on the research project, "Information Technologies in Russia, 1450-1850."