I am currently writing my doctoral thesis on a literary genre called the ‘human document’, a transnational phenomenon crossing various first-person forms (memoir, autobiographical fiction, confessional and epistolary writing), popularised in Russophone literature of the postrevolutionary emigration to Europe.
As co-convenor of the OCCT discussion group, I help organise and chair fortnightly talks, research presentations and discussion sessions on given topics in the fields of comparative literature and translation. My involvement in the OCCT research centre follows a prolonged interest in the transnational contexts of Russian literary and visual arts. Having caught onto Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian novels as an undergraduate, I developed a fascination with the émigré literary world of his contemporaries; meanwhile I wrote my MPhil dissertation on Sergei Eisenstein’s travels throughout Europe and the Americas, exploring the role of literary and architectural modernisms abroad in the evolution of his cinema theory and practice.
Prior to joining the OCCT, I presented research at its graduate symposium (Trinity term, 2026) and participated in the Harvard Institute for World Literature summer programme at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (June-July, 2026), attending seminars on literature in exile and the migration of literary forms.
I also translate Russian-language fiction and poetry; in August 2026 I was awarded the Gertrude Hartley Prize (Balliol College) for my translation of a poem by Osip Mandelstam.
