Natasha Rulyova

In the mid-1990s, I worked as an interpreter and a translator for CARE International in Perm and for the National Democratic Institute of the Democratic Party of the USA (NDI) in Moscow. In 1997, I was granted a full bursary to do an MPhil in European Literature followed by a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge. Upon the completion of my PhD in 2002, I had my first job as Lecturer in Russian at the University of Surrey. Two years later, I started to work as Research Fellow on the AHRC project ‘Post-Soviet Television Culture’ led by Stephen Hutchings’ at the University of Surrey. In 2006, I joined the Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham. Since 2013, I have been Russian Language Lead in the Department of Modern Languages.

Since 2015, my research focused on developing a theory of collaborative self-translation, which emerged from my original and painstaking archival research of the bilingual work by the Russian-American Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996). My monograph Joseph Brodsky and Collaborative Translation (Bloomsbury 2020) is a significant contribution to the growing field of self-translation in translation studies and to the body of scholarly work focusing on Brodsky’s legacy because I propose to view Brodsky’s work in English as the product of multi-authored collaboration, in the course of which the poet shaped his idiosyncratic voice. A review of the book by Prof. Hodgson states that ‘The author, with an admirably light touch, guides us through the intercultural space in which Brodsky and his translators met, tussled, negotiated, and created. Rulyova succeeds in showing how collaborative translation allowed Brodsky to curate his own authentic English voice’

Prior to this, my research centred on the innovative developments in genre studies. In 2012, I was awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant (£31,616) titled ‘Genre Studies Network. The interdisciplinary Genre Studies Project attracted leading scholars from the USA, Canada, Russia, Germany, Brazil and Belgium who discussed aspects of genre in the course of seven workshops organised in London and Birmingham. The workshops also created the opportunities for collaboration between scholars and practitioners including Birmingham City library practitioners, archival workers and journalists who shared their applied knowledge of genre with academics. This project resulted in the publication of the co-edited (with Garin Dowd) volume Genre Trajectories: Identifying, Mapping, Projecting (London: Palgrave, 2015), two single-authored chapters and one article in a refereed journal.

Between 2006 and 2012, I studied post-Soviet media culture with a particular focus on television texts and their reception by post-Soviet audiences. I co-authored a monograph titled Television and Culture in Putin’s Russia: Remote Control (Routledge 2009). One of the reviews states that the book ‘goes well beyond a mere discussion of Russian television during the years of Putin’s reign’ (from a review by T.J. Garza published in Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2012). I co-edited (with Stephen Hutchings and Birgit Beumers) two volumes and one special issue on post-Soviet media. Between 2007-2011, She was awarded by CEELBAS several small grants (over £14,000) to organise four networking series of events on Russian media, new media and media research methodologies, which led to the publication of the edited volume (with J. Morris and V. Strukov, eds) New Media in New Europe-Asia, Europe-Asia Studies and three single-authored articles. My expertise in post-Soviet media is evidenced by many invitations to speak on BBC programmes including BBC Radio 5, BBC 24 Hour News, and BBC World News in April-March 2018. I contributed to The Conversation (and was invited to take part in a UoB podcast.