Prof Claire Whitehead

Prof Claire Whitehead

Professor

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 1 2025-26

 

Research areas

I work on Russophone literature and culture from the nineteenth century onwards, and have a particular interest in narrative theory and social history.

Female Crime Writers: I am currently writing a book entitled Russia's First Female Crime Writers, 1860-1917. Work is funded by a British Academy / Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for the academic year 2025-26. It will be the first study in any language of five women who wrote crime fiction in the late imperial era. It will consider their work in terms of social history and literary practice and evidences my ongoing commitment to diversifying Slavic Studies.

Related work on this topic includes an article on Aleksandra Sokolova (1833-1916) which was published by Slavonic and East European Review in 2021 (here).

Previous work on Russophone crime fiction was published as The Poetics of Early Russian Crime Fiction, 1860-1917: Deciphering Tales of Detection by Legenda in 2018. This book is still the only book-length study of the formative years of a genre that now enjoys almost unrivalled popularity in post-Soviet Russia. You can read more about it in this blog interview with the North American Dostoevsky Society: https://bloggerskaramazov.com.

More 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', published by Modern Languages Open in 2023. 

Lost Detectives: Arising out of my work on Russian-language crime fiction, I lead 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.

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. More broadly in the School, I contribute to various Comparative Literature modules, including CO2002 Journeys (on which I teach Dostoevskii's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions). 

Selected publications

 

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