Professor Evgeny Dobrenko
University of Sheffield
Professor Dobrenko has worked both in Russia (Odessa State University, Moscow State University, the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow) and in the USA (Duke University, Stanford University, Amherst College, University of California, New York University). He moved to Sheffield in January 2007 after six years as a Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of many books (including Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories, Northwestern UP, 2005; The Making of the State Writer: Social and Aesthetic Origins of Soviet Literary Culture Stanford, Stanford UP, 2001; The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, Stanford UP, 1997), and more than 200 articles and essays and his work has been translated into eight languages. His research interests lie in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, Socialist Realism, Russian and Soviet film, critical theory and Soviet cultural history.
He is currently working on a book-length project "Empire of Words: Soviet Literature as a Multinational Phenomenon." The project is devoted to the history of the formation and development of the former Soviet national literatures (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Moldavian, Armenian, Georgian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kirgiz, and "recent literacy" of the Far North) during the twentieth century.
