We've got an incredible line-up of world-renowned and highly-esteemed guests! Just take a look at who's taking part: Aidan Hart, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Angus Roxburgh, Ben Judah, Bridget Kendall, Claire Whitehead, George Carey, Harvey Pitcher, Prof. John Anderson, Dr. Maria Starkova-Vindman, Michelle Berdy, Dr. Natalia Murray, Teresa Cherfas.
Source: Aidan Hart
Aidan Hart has been a professional icon painter since 1983. His commissioned icons, frescoes and carvings are found in over twenty countries of the world.
He is author of the definitive book on icon painting, Techniques of icon and Wall Painting and is one of the illuminators for the famed Saint John's Bible. In 2009 he founded and continues to teach The Diploma in Icon and Wall Painting for The Prince's School of Traditional Art.
He has strong ties to Russia through his membership of the Orthodox Church and its iconography, and between 1984 and 1987 travelled to Russia to study its iconography. His most recent major work has been to carve a stone icon screen and paint icons for the Russian Orthodox church of St Nicholas in Amsterdam.
Source: BBC - Art Of Germany
Andrew Graham-Dixon is the most gifted art critic of his generation. Unsparing, witty and probing, with a supple style, a real passion for the concrete body of
art and a clear sense of its social environment, he encourages you to think and feel.
- Robert Hughes, former art critic of Time Magazine and writer of
The Shock of the New.
Following distinguished beginnings at Oxford and The Courtauld Institute of Art, Andrew Graham Dixon was appointed chief art critic of the Independent at the age of 25 where he remained for the next 12 years. For three years in a row he was decorated with the title Arts Journalist of The Year, in addition to which he later won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for Art Criticism. He has written quite a lot of books too.
Since 1991 Dixon has carved out a career in broadcasting, characterised by numerous awards and multiple ground-breaking series including A History of British Art, The Art of Eternity and my personal favourite The Art of Russia, which saw him travel right across the vast country, presenting audiences with a thorough and impassioned account of the last 1000 years in Russian Art. He is perhaps best known today as presenter of BBC2's The Culture Show.
Source: BBC News
Roxburgh studied Russian at Aberdeen University, following which he spent two years in Moscow as a translator with Progress Publishers.
After numerous journalism posts in the UK, he was appointed as the Sunday Times' Moscow Correspondent in 1987, and was well placed over the next
decade to chart both the dramatic fall of Communism (in Eastern Europe and the USSR) as well as the ensuing chaos of the 90s in Russia.
As the BBC's Moscow's Correspondent from late 1991, his reporting covered the transition, the first Chechen War and the rise of Boris Yeltsin.
His work with the BBC also included a period spent as Europe Correspondent. However, it is his more recent experience as Media Adviser to the Kremlin and Series
Consultant on the recent BBC2 documentary Putin, Russia and The West that gives him unusual insider info and sets him apart as one of the West's
most up to date and well-informed Russian commentators.
Angus Roxburgh is also a musician and published author. He will be selling copies of his new book on Putin The Strongman at the 'Current Affairs'
event on Sunday 22nd April.
Source: ECFR.eu
Ben Judah joined the European Council on Foreign Relations as a Policy Fellow in September 2010. Previously he was a reporter based in Moscow with Reuters.
His reporting from across the former Soviet Union - including on the Georgian War and the Kyrgyz revolution of 2010 has also featured in publications including The Financial Times, The Economist, Prospect and Foreign Policy.
Source: BBC News
Bridget Kendall is perhaps best known nowadays as the BBC's prominent Diplomatic Correspondent and Presenter of numerous series on BBC Radio 4.
However, 20 years ago she was the BBC'S woman in Moscow for the fall of The Soviet Union.
Remaining there until 1994 she witnessed all the turbulent events of transition, the Putsch, Yeltsin's takeover and the following spiral into economic and
social mayhem.
Kendall has personally interviewed Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, the three great actors in Russia's most recent history.
Since then Bridget has worked as Washington Correspondent and in 1998 took on the Diplomatic post which she retains to this day.
In 1993 she was awarded the James Cameron Award for Journalism in recognition of her consistently insightful reporting.
Source: University Of St Andrews
Dr. Claire Whitehead is a very popular academic working here at the University of St Andrews. Her research interests focus on prose fiction in Russia and France from the nineteenth century onwards.
Having published her first monograph on the fantastic short story with Legenda in 2006, she is currently researching a book-length study of detective fiction in Russia from the 1860s to the present day. Authors of interest in this genre include, amongst many others, Sokolovskii, Stepanov, Timofeev, Dostoevskii, Panov, Shkliarevskii, Chekhov, Geintse, Shaginian, Semenov and Akunin.
Source: Academia Rossica
George Carey is one of the pioneering figures behind much of our most intelligent and investigative television programming. As a director/editor at BBC News, he created
and was the first editor of Newsnight, was editor of Panorama during the Falklands War and then left the BBC to set up his own independent production
company which excelled in documentary film-making and won several major industry awards.
He was executive producer for Question Time and invented the widely-acclaimed Channel 4 series Unreported World.
In 2005, Carey was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by The Royal Television Society. He has had a long-standing interest in Russia and after many years as a television executive, he has now become an acclaimed film-maker, shooting and reporting from what he calls 'the undergrowth' of Russia today.
Source: Harvey Pitcher
Harvey Pitcher qualified as a Russian interpreter during National Service at Cambridge and Crail. After a brief career as an academic at the Universities of Glasgow and St Andrews, where he started the Russian Department, he launched himself on a second career as a writer.
He is the author of the travel classic, When
Miss Emmie was in Russia, and of three other 'Anglo-Russian' books: The Smiths of Moscow, Muir & Mirrielees, about the
famous British-owned department store in tsarist Moscow, and Witnesses of the Russian Revolution. His Chekhov publications include The Chekhov
Play, Chekhov's Leading Lady (a biography of Chekhov's wife, Olga Knipper) and Chekhov: The Early Stories (co-translator with
Patrick Miles). His collection, Chekhov: The Comic Stories, was published in 1998.
He describes his latest book, Responding to Chekhov: The Journey of a Lifetime, as 'a kind of debriefing after a long and varied journey'.
Harvey's talk is intended to dent the popular image of Chekhov as 'that gloomy Russian playwright' and to contribute some lighter moments to Russia Week.
Source: University Of St Andrews
Professor Anderson is the head of IR here at St Andrews. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1986.
After a period of study in Moscow during 1987 he held teaching positions at the LSE, Westminster and Middlesex Universities before spending a year as Lecturer in Politics in Edinburgh University. He took up his position at St Andrews in 1991.
His teaching and research interests lie in the field of religion and politics, and in post-Soviet politics, and recently he has been looking into Russian debates about religious pluralism, religion and artistic expression, and religious attitudes to questions of sexual orientation.
Source: Courtauld Institute Of Art
Dr. Maria Starkova-Vindman specialises in Russian 20th-century culture and Italian Renaissance art history. Previously she worked as a curator at the
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and assisted in teaching an MA course on politics in contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute.
She has been a guest lecturer on Russian 20th-century art in London (including Courtauld Institute and Sotheby's) during the past five years.
Having received her MA as a Kilfinan Scholar from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a PhD from Moscow State University in Italian Renaissance art history, she is currently working on her new research project on early Soviet visual culture at the Courtauld Institute. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the image of the New Soviet child as a Pioneer citizen of the USSR (1922-1941). Other research interests include theoretical development of Socialist realism, shaping national identity through art, design of early Soviet periodicals and publications for children, Russian contemporary art.
Source: Unknown
Michele Berdy is a very popular and entertaining author, writer, translator, conference speaker.
She also enjoyed a decade-long career producing innovative public affairs programming for American and Russian television.
Ms Berdy writes a popular weekly column on language and translation for The Moscow Timesand The St. Petersburg Times, as well as book reviews and feature stories
about Moscow and Russian culture.
Her articles on culture, current events and various aspects of intercultural communication appear in the Russian and English-language press.
She was also the lead or sole writer of four guidebooks about Moscow, St Petersburg and Russia, and co-author of a Russian-English dictionary.
Source: Courtauld Institute Of Art
Dr. Natalia Murray was born in St Petersburg where she read Art History for five years at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1998 she completed her doctoral thesis at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and moved to the UK after meeting her husband (who has an MA in History and Political Economy from St. Andrew's University).
Her interest in the Russian Avant-Garde was always there, but was brought to the surface when she met the grand-daughter of one of the most influential Russian art critics of the early C20th, Nikolay Punin, and began to write a book about him and his struggle to keep Avant-Garde art alive in Russia after the Revolution.
Natalia's biography of Nikolay Punin, 'The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde. The Life and Times of Nikolay Punin (1888-1953)', will be published by Brill Academic Publishers in April 2012.
At present Natalia is writing her second PhD thesis, at the Courtauld (where she is also lecturing on C20th Russian Art), on the development of proletarian art in Russia after the 1917 Revolution, and its various forms of expression in the street decorations of Petrograd.
Source: Academia Rossica
Teresa Cherfas is a documentary producer for television and radio who specializes in Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union.
She has worked on major television history series, including Last of the Czars (a three-part history of Nicholas and Alexandra for Discovery),
Stalin (made in 1989, it was the first of its kind to tell the story of Stalin's rule from inside the USSR), Messengers from Moscow
(shown on BBC2 in four parts and about Moscow's commitment to World Revolution as played out in Europe, Asia and the Third World) as well as films about contemporary
Russian history and politics, such as Babitsky's War (awarded an Amnesty Media Prize), Beslan (BAFTA award-winner) and more
recently, A Journey through Russia with Jonathan Dimbley, which she co-produced with George Carey.
Since then, she has produced three more films (in collaboration with George Carey as reporter and director) about Russia: Close Encounters in Siberia,
A Long Weekend with the Son of God and Knocking on Heaven's Door.