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PhD/DPhil - Doctor of Philosophy
Clifton Campus
Full Time
Sep 2026
4 Year
The Department of Russian has an outstanding record of research. We pride ourselves on our strong, active research culture, and the research interests of staff span a broad range of disciplinary emphases. We can support postgraduate research in many areas within the following broad fields: Russian and Russophone literature from the 18th century to the present; Russian intellectual history from the 19th century to the 20th century; Russian and Soviet film and visual culture; Soviet history; Stalinist culture and the Stalin cult; British-Soviet wartime relations (1941-45); Literary and cultural theory; Issues of cultural identity (semiotics of space, perceptions of time and of modernity); Transnational and decolonial approaches; Urban studies; Russian Orthodox theology and culture; Gender and sexuality in Russian literature and culture; Translation studies; Media studies; Medicine and the body in literature and visual culture; Late-19th and early-20th-century Czech literature and visual culture. Recent and ongoing projects by our postgraduates include: The history of Soviet translation theory; Translatorial visibility and agency in the post-editing process through the lens of feminist translation studies; Contested feminisms in Soviet, Post-Soviet and contemporary Russian translations of Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, 1976-2010; The corporeality of mourning in post-Soviet women's prose; Blood and the body in the Bolshevik utopian project.
Research project undertaken across three years (full-time, plus a writing up period), culminating in an 80,000 word thesis.