SSEES Academic Spotlight: Stefan Lacny

What brought to you work at SSEES?

Perhaps the main factor that attracted me to SSEES is the holistic approach it takes to central-eastern Europe and the Slavonic world. Among centres of Slavonic studies in the UK, SSEES is unique both in the geographical and linguistic range that it covers and in the wide variety of disciplines that it applies to the region. As someone with a literature and culture background, I love regularly conversing with colleagues who are specialists in history, politics and economics, something that enriches and occasionally challenges my thinking.

Regarding my own research focus, I feel fortunate to work at an institution with such expertise in Soviet cinema. Perhaps more importantly, the strength of SSEES in Ukrainian and Polish studies is an invaluable attribute today more than ever. The diversity and depth of its specialisms make SSEES such a rewarding place to work in and I have been made to feel very welcome by my colleagues so far.

If you weren’t working in Higher Education, what would be your dream job?

That would require some serious thinking! I am rather interested in politics, especially at European level. Before starting my PhD, I completed a traineeship at the European Parliament in Luxembourg, which was rewarding for the proximity that it gave me to policy formation in our continent’s largest democratic assembly. With this in mind, perhaps I would work in one of the European institutions in a position that combined politics with a multinational and multilingual professional environment.

Can you tell us a bit about your current role and what you were doing before you arrived here?

I am currently working at SSEES as a lecturer in Russian culture, language and translation. My responsibilities include leading undergraduate courses on Russian/Soviet literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present day, as well as teaching Russian language and translation classes. My research and teaching interests extend beyond Russian subjects into areas of Polish and Ukrainian studies too.

I arrived at SSEES shortly after finishing my PhD in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge last year. My PhD thesis examined Soviet cinematic depictions of Poles and Ukrainians from 1925 to 1941 in the context of the USSR’s annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. This research focus combined my specialisation in Soviet cinema with my interest in Stalin-era formulations of national identities in the USSR’s western republics. During my doctoral research, I was fortunate to spend a year from 2022 to 2023 as a visiting student at the University of Warsaw, Poland, where I took Ukrainian language classes.

Outside of work, how do you unwind?

I tend to spend probably more time than is healthy reading up on politics and elections in various countries across Europe and beyond. Aside from this, I enjoy tracking down the best speciality cafés wherever I am and travelling to new places in Poland, where I have spent a lot of time in recent years. Music is also a passion of mine. In a previous life, I used to play the violin and the piano quite actively. Though I find less time for playing these days, I still regularly listen to everything ranging from J.S. Bach and Shostakovich to David Bowie and Sparks.

If you could recommend only one book, what would it be?

Narrowing it down to just one book is quite the challenge! Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel The Master and Margarita is the work that first inspired me to study Russian at university, so that has to get a mention. I am currently working my way through Olga Tokarczuk’s epic historical novel The Books of Jacob, which offers an astonishingly vivid depiction of life in the last decades of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century. It is so absorbing that I can’t really think of anything else at the moment, so let’s opt for that.

What is your biggest professional achievement to date?

I recently found out that an article of mine won the 2025 BASEES Prize for the Best Scholarly Article by a Postgraduate Student, which was wonderful (if unexpected) news to receive. Beyond this, though, I would say that my biggest professional achievement so far is successfully completing my PhD last year while (just about) keeping body and mind together, something that certainly did not always feel guaranteed!

Visit Stefan Lacny's UCL profile here.