The Department is pleased to welcome new members of staff with diverse backgrounds and fresh perspectives to the Slavonic Studies team.
Stanley Bill is our new Lecturer in Polish Studies. He works largely on twentieth-century Polish literature and culture, with particular interests in religion, secularization theory and postcolonial interpretations of Polish cultural history. Stan has written on Czesław Miłosz, Bruno Schulz, and postcolonial theory in the Polish context, as well as on religious problems in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He worked at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow before coming to Cambridge. Stan completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in the United States. He originally hails from Perth, Australia.
Claire Knight is our Lecturer in Russian History and Culture through 2016. She has been part of the Cambridge Slavonic Studies family for years, having recently completed her PhD in the Department on postwar Stalin-era Soviet cinema. She has lectured here and at King’s College London on late Imperial Russian and Soviet history, History and Memory, and historical methodologies. Her research interests are Stalin-era Soviet history, particularly the postwar period; Soviet cinema and visual culture; wartime relations between Britain and the USSR; and representations of the Soviet Union in Western media. Claire relishes the opportunity to make historical investigation approachable and interesting for students of literature.
Edyta Nowosielska joins the Department as the new instructor of our open language courses in Polish. She has over fifteen years of experience teaching Polish as a Foreign Language. Most recently she has worked as a Teaching Fellow in the Polish Language at UCL/SSEES. In 2000, Edyta founded the first private Polish language school for adults in London, which she continues to run today. She holds a Master Degree in Literature and Linguistics from the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. She is also working toward a PhD at PUNO (Polish University Abroad), helping develop an experimental course and a new method of teaching Polish as a Foreign Language.
Olenka Pevny is our new Lecturer in Pre-Modern East Slavic Culture. Before coming to Cambridge, she held the position of Associate Professor of Byzantine and Medieval Art and served as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Richmond, Virginia. Trained as an Art Historian of Byzantium and the Orthodox world, she has studied the role of visual culture as a locus of expression in narratives of communal, regional, national, religious, class and gender identity. More specifically, she has explored the reception and acculturation of the Orthodox visual tradition in Eastern Slavic lands, particularly in Kyivan Rus’, Ruthenia, the late Russian Empire, and Soviet and contemporary Ukraine.
Olga Plocienniczak, our new Departmental Administrator, is covering for Rachael Crossman, who is on maternity leave. Olga comes to us with very diverse experience working as an administrator in the Department of Psychiatry and the Graduate School of Life Sciences at the University. She has an enthusiastic interest in art, performance and education, having been a team member at Creative Arts Development, the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, and Squeaky Gate, a creative education charity for people at risk of social exclusion. Olga has a MA degree in Russian Studies from the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznan, where she specialised in Russian literature.
Josephine von Zitzewitz joins us as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. She holds a DPhil from Oxford where she spent the last five years working as a Stipendiary Lecturer and Junior Research Fellow in Russian. Alongside her Leverhulme project – which focuses on Leningrad Samizdat as Social and Material Culture – Josie is working on a monograph on Viktor Krivulin, one of the most important underground poets of the late Soviet era, focusing on Krivulin’s indebtedness to various Silver Age figures. She pursues her second interest, the memory of the Gulag, as a research associate for the ‘Virtual Museum of the Gulag’ http://www.gulagmuseum.org), a project run by ‘Memorial’ St Petersburg.
Welcome, everyone!
