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 2, 2025-26

 

Research areas

I work on Russophone literature and culture from the nineteenth century onwards, with 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 the handful of women who wrote crime fiction in the late imperial era. 

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: I lead a public engagement and impact project, kindly funded by the University of St Andrews, entitled 'Lost Detectives: Adapting Old Texts for New Media', and work with the author-illustrator, Carol Adlam. Carol's graphic novel adaptation of an 1876 work by Semyon Panov was published as The Russian Detective in 2024. 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 teach at all levels in both the department and the School of Modern Languages. In the Russian Department, I frequently coordinate and teach on our Beginners' Language modules (RU1001 and RU1002). 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. I also 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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