Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

I came to Keele as Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Cultural Theory in April 2009. Before this I was a Lecturer in Russian at Manchester University from 1983 to 1994, and Professor of Russian at Sheffield from 1994 to 2009. Between 2004 and 2007 I was President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, and in 2012 joined the Committee of DASSH-UK, the national forum for Deans and leaders of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines in Higher Education Institutions. I am a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, and of Sub-Panel 28 (Modern Languages and Linguistics) for REF 2014.

My principal research interests lie in three areas:

• twentieth-century Russian culture, where I have pioneered new, multidisciplinary approaches;
• critical and cultural theory, with particular reference to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle (I was the founding Director of the Bakhtin Centre at Sheffield University);
• digital humanities, with particular reference to the developing role of e-Science in arts and humanities research (for several years I was Director of Sheffield University’s Humanities Research Institute, a leading centre for the digital humanities).