CEELBAS POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH TRAINING WORKSHOPS: Literary Theory Masterclass with Professor Galin Tihanov/ Academic Publishing Workshop

What is World Literature? Responses from Soviet Russia. Literary Theory Masterclass with Professor Galin Tihanov

This one-day workshop aims to develop the research training skills of doctoral researchers working with literary texts in Russian and Eastern European studies. It has been organized as part of a programme of training events this autumn which is supported by the CEELBAS Centre for Doctoral Training.

In addition to the above, the event provides a valuable networking opportunity for young scholars to make new contacts within this field. 

Before the programme opens with a masterclass led by Professor Galin Tihanov, the attendees are invited for a sandwich lunch with tea and coffee at 1pm. The masterclass will be followed by three further short presentations on the theme of ‘World Literature from a Russian Perspective’ or ‘Russian Literature in the Context of World Literature’ from current PhD students working in related fields. The workshop will finish at 4pm.

Professor Galin Tihanov holds the George Steiner Chair of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He was previously Professor of Comparative Literature and Intellectual History and founding co-director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at the University of Manchester. His most recent research has been on exile, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism. His publications include three books and a number of (co)edited volumes, as well as articles on German, Russian, French, and Central-European intellectual and cultural history and on cultural and literary theory. Some of his work has been translated into Bulgarian, Danish, French, German, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Slovene. He is currently completing books on the uses of the Romantic tradition in twentieth-century European and American culture and on Russian literary and cultural theory between the World Wars.

Professor Tihanov’s influential article 'Why did modern literary theory originate in Central and Eastern Europe? and why is it now dead?' was published in Common Knowledge eight years ago. The article presented an ambitious overview of the rise and fall of one of the twentieth-century’s dominant intellectual currents - literary theory - and its relation to the cultural space of Russia and Eastern Europe. It examined literary theory’s roots in philosophy, its emergence in response to the changing social relevance of literature in inter-war Eastern Europe and the impact of institutional factors arising from 20th century nation-building processes. However, the conclusion was that recent changes in the configuration of these broad factors had also resulted in the irrevocable decline of literary theory as a distinct intellectual project.

Academic Publishing Workshop

A workshop on academic publishing starts at 4.30pm and will last approximately one hour. It will be led by Professor Wendy Bracewell (UCL SSEES) and Dr Barbara Wyllie (editorial secretary of the Slavonic and East European Review). It has been organized as part of a programme of training events this autumn which is supported by the CEELBAS Centre for Doctoral Training.

Professor Wendy Bracewell started out as an early modern historian, working especially on the frontiers between the Habsburg, Venetian and Ottoman empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her main work on this subject is The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic. Subsequently, Professor Bracewell started working on travel and travel writing, and established a large interdisciplinary project called 'East Looks West' on east European travel writing about Europe, 1550-2000, funded by the AHRC and other funding bodies. Professor Bracewell’s current project is a study of travel polemics: the ways that people 'travelees' - respond to reading foreign travellers' accounts of their societies. 

Dr Barbara Wyllie is a Deputy Editor of Slavonic and East European Review (SEER).She read English at Cambridge and then took a Master’s in Russian Literature at SSEES, where she went on to study for a PhD on Nabokov. She began working on the Slavonic and East European Review in October 2000 while continuing to write on Nabokov. Her first monograph, Nabokov at the Movies: Film Perspectives in Fiction, was published in 2003. She has an article forthcoming in the Nabokov Online Journal (NOJ) and a chapter in the Cambridge University Press collection, Nabokov in Context in 2016. As well as being Deputy Editor of SEER, in February 2015 she was invited to become an Associate Editor of NOJ. Her wider research interests are in Russian and American literature, cinema and music. 

The number of places for both workshops is limited.

To register please contact CEELBAS Administrator Anna Tremain a.tremain@ucl.ac.uk.