Dr Helen Stuhr-Rommereim

Dr Helen Stuhr-Rommereim

Lecturer in Slavonic and Russophone Literatures and Cultures

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 1727
Email
hrsr1@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Room 24
Location
United Colleges
Office hours
On leave in Semester 2 2025-26

 

Biography

I hold a MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania; a MA from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London; and a BA from Oberlin College. Before joining St Andrews in 2024, I taught at Swarthmore College.

Teaching

I teach at all levels in the Russian department and in the School of Modern Languages. My research-related teaching focuses on two Honours modules I have designed: Worlds of Russophone Literature (RU4155) and Political Literature Before 1917 (RU4157). I also regularly contribute to teaching in Comparative Literature and on the School of Modern Languages MLitt degrees. 

Research areas

My research focuses on the cultural history of the Russian Empire. My broad interests fall at the intersection of literary and cultural representation, media history, political thought, and social history from the 1860s to 1917. 

Russia's Literary Proletariat: My first book, Gravediggers of Realism: Russia's Literary Proletariat, 1857-1878, will be published by Northern Illinois UP (an imprint of Cornell UP) in June 2027. 

Gravediggers of Realism tells the story of a cohort of poor, working writers who contributed literary fiction to the radical Russian press in the 1860s and 1870s, centrally Nikolai Uspensky, Fedor Reshetnikov, Nikolai Pomialovsky, and Alexander Levitov. It shows how the literary proletarians pushed the limits of realist literature to represent lower-class life in the Russian Empire in new ways. Along the way, it reconsiders key categories for Russian social and cultural history: narod, meshchane, and intelligentsia. 

A related article on Fedor Reshetnikov was published in Russian Review in 2021 (here); an article on pseudo-autobiographical texts by the literary proletarians was published in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie in 2023 (here). With Mari Jarris (Cornell), I have also published on Nikolai Chernyshevsky's relevance for Marxist feminism, published in 2020 (here). With Vadim Shneyder (UCLA), I co-edited a two-volume special issue of Slavic Literatures, "Other Russian Nineteenth-Century Literatures," published in 2025 (part 1 and part 2).

Culture and Masses after 1905: my current book project focuses on cultural responses to the 1905 revolution in the aftermath of mass mobilisations across classes, sectors, and nationalities, and in the context of the growth of commercial culture (working title, Mass Strike, Mass Society: Political Movements, Media Technology, and Cultural Responses to the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1910). The first installment of this project is an article-length study of Russian Jewish author David Aizman's revolutionary play The Thorn Bush (1906) and the circumstances of its first performance in a makeshift dacha theatre, currently in progress. 

With theatre artist and assistant professor of directing at the University of Iowa Johanna Kasimow, I am also developing an interactive workshop-performance based on Aizman's play, as well as a translation of the play. 

The Other 19v: In 2020, I started the "Other 19v" reading group as a part of the 19v working group hosted by New York University. Since then the group has met roughly monthly to discuss lesser known Russophone writers of the long nineteenth century. I currently co-coordinate the group with Yulia Dubasova (USC). We meet online, once a month on Fridays during the academic year at 5pm UK time. This year, we will discuss writers including Mamin-Sibiriak, Khomiakov, Gusev-Orenburgsky, Solovyova and Manaseina, Kuprin, and more. To learn our 26-27 schedule, join the group, or present, please email me. 

Public writing: I was for many years an editor at Full Stop magazine and still welcome the opportunity to write for non-academic audiences. Most recently, I published an essay on parallels between Nikolai Pomialovsky's pair of novellas Bourgeois Happiness and Molotov (1861) and the romance series Heated Rivalry in Jacobin magazine. 

Selected publications

 

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