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UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

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Ben Phillips

Ben Phillips

Supervisors: Dr Sarah Young and Prof Wendy Bracewell
Email: b.phillips.12@ucl.ac.uk

Present status: PhD candidate, Post-graduate Teaching Assistant
Modules Taught: Modern Historiography (Term 2), Person, Lova and Utopia (Term 1 and 2)

Working title of thesis: Revolutionary images of exile between Siberia and the Western emigration, 1880-1917

Research: My thesis deals with Anglo-Russian literary representations of the nineteenth century Siberian exile system (katorga i ssylka) in the context of the Russian revolutionary emigration to the West in the decades before 1917. Drawing on the post-Soviet upsurge in postcolonial approaches to the histories of the USSR and the Russian Empire alike, my research explores the ways in which hard labour and exile served as motifs common to revolutionary emigrés, their radical contacts in the Anglo-American world and contemporary Anglophone travelogue, how Russians' uniquely multipolar experience of exile created affinities between such disparate exilic locations as London and Eastern Siberia, and how these affinities served simultaneously to frame and problematise fin de siècle constructions of East and West.