Dr Claire Whitehead

Dr Claire Whitehead

Reader

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2951
Email
cew12@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Room 44
Location
United Colleges
Office hours
On leave in Semester 2, 2023-24

 

Research areas

I work on Russophone literature and culture from the nineteenth century onwards, and have a particular interest in narrative theory. My two principal research areas are crime fiction and the fantastic.

Russian Crime Fiction: My monograph The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction, 1860-1917: Deciphering Tales of Detection was published by Legenda in 2018. It is the first book-length study in any language of the formative years of a genre that now enjoys almost unrivalled popularity in post-Soviet Russia. It discusses works by little-known authors such as Nikolai Sokolovskii, Petr Stepanov, Nikolai Timofeev, Semyon Panov, Aleksandr Shkliarevskii and Andrei Zarin as well as offering new readings of Dostoevskii and Chekhov. You can read more about the book in this blog interview with the North American Dostoevsky Society: https://bloggerskaramazov.com.

Most recently, I have co-authored an article with Grace Docherty on 'Bodies of Evidence: The Depiction of Violence Against Female Characters in Late Imperial Russian Crime Fiction', just published by Modern Languages Open. 

My current research turns its attention to female crime writers from the same era. My article on Aleksandra Sokolova (1833-1916) was published by Slavonic and East European Review in 2021 (here) and I have given various papers on her and Kapitolina Nazar'eva (1847-1900) and Liudmila Simonova (1838-1906). These and other female authors and their crime writing will be the subject of my next monograph.

Lost Detectives: Arising out of my work on Russian crime fiction, I am now leading a Knowledge Exchange and Impact project, kindly funded by the University of St Andrews, entitled 'Lost Detectives: Adapting Old Texts for New Media', on which I am collaborating with the author-illustrator, Carol Adlam. Carol's graphic novel adaptation of an 1876 work by Semyon Panov has recently been published as The Russian Detective by Jonathan Cape. Rachel Cooke in the Guardian calls it 'an exquisitely illustrated celebration of early crime fiction' (see here). Carol and I have recently co-authored an article on our collaborative experience on this project here: 'Intermedial Adaptations of Nineteenth-Century Russian Crime Fiction' published by Adaptation.

The Fantastic: My first book (arising out of my PhD) was The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century: In Pursuit of Hesitation (Legenda, 2006). It provides a comparative analysis of the various narrative techniques that provoke hesitation in the mind of the reader about the interpretation of possibly supernatural events. I am also the editor of the 2012 volume Critical Insights: The Fantastic (Salem Books) which brings together various essays on the subject.

I would welcome postgraduate inquiries from students interested in pursuing projects in any area of the long nineteenth-century in Russophone literature and culture, as well as in crime fiction, the fantastic and comparative literature.

Teaching

I am an experienced and enthusiastic teacher who believes passionately in the role that the teaching of modern foreign languages and literatures has to play in opening up our understanding of other cultures, as well as of our own. 

In the Russian Department, I frequently coordinate and teach on our Beginners' Language modules (RU1001 and RU1002), as well as teaching literature, grammar and translation on various other modules from first- to final-year. My research-related teaching focusses on three Honours modules: RU3022 The Nineteenth-Century Russophone Novel; RU4142 The Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century Russophone Literature; and RU4144 Russian Crime Fiction, as well as our core postgraduate modules: RU5011 and RU5013 New Approaches to the Russophone Literary Canon. More broadly in the School, I contribute to various Comparative Literature modules, including CO2002 Journeys (Dostoevskii's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions), as well as CO4028 Great Works and their Adaptations. 

PhD supervision

  • Grace Docherty
  • Sarah King

Selected publications

 

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