Staff in the Department of Russian

Dr Alastair Renfrew, BA Strathclyde, PhD Sheffield

Contact Dr Alastair Renfrew (email at alastair.renfrew2@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

Alastair Renfrew taught at the universities of Strathclyde and Exeter before coming to Durham in 2007. His main area of research specialization is critical and literary theory, with particular emphasis on the Soviet 1920s. He has published widely on Mikhail Bakhtin and the so-called Russian Formalists, including the monograph Towards a New Material Aesthetics (Legenda, 2006) and the recent collection Critical Theory in Russia and the West (Routledge 2010), and is currently completing an introduction to Bakhtin for Routledge Critical Thinkers. He has also taught and published on Russian and Soviet Cinema, Russian and Scottish Literature and is Editor of the journal Slavonica. He was Head of Russian from 2007 to 2010, Director of Research in the School of Modern Languages & Cultures from 2009 to 2011, and Head of School from 2011 to 2012.

Research Groups

• Literature/History/Theory
• Visual and Performance

Publications

Books: authored

• 2013 Mikhail Bakhtin, Routledge.
• 2006 Towards a New Material Aesthetics: Bakhtin, Genre and the Fates of Literary Theory, Legenda, 200 pp.

Books: edited

• 2012 (co-edited with Carruthers, Gerard & Goldie, David) Scotland and the Nineteenth-Century World, Rodopi, 285 pp. pp.
• 2010 (co-edited with Tihanov, Galin) Critical Theory in Russia and the West, Routledge, 192 pp.
• 2004 (co-edited with Carruthers, Gerard & Goldie, David) Beyond Scotland: New Contexts for Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature, Rodopi, 267 pp.
• 1997 Exploiting Bakhtin, University of Strathclyde.
• 1997 (co-edited with Adlam, Carol, Falconer, Rachel & Makhlin, Vitalii) Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, Sheffield Academic Press, 400 pp.

Books: sections

• 2012 'Ivanovo detstvo', in Vasil'eva, Ekaterina & Braginskii, Nikita (eds.), Noev kovcheg russkogo kino: ot "Sten'ki Razina" do "Stiliag", Globus-Press, pp. 195-200
• 2010 'The Resurrection of a Poetics', in Renfrew, Alastair & Tihanov, Galin (eds.), Critical Theory in Russia and the West, Routledge, pp. 1-25
• 2008 'Before Learning to Speak: Genre in Tarkovsky's Earlier Features', in Dunne, Nathan (ed.), Tarkovsky, Black Dog Press, pp. 96-121
• 2004 'Kul't lichnosti [A Cult of Personality]', in Makhlin, V. (ed.), Bakhtinskii sbornik V, lazyki slavianskoi kul'tury, pp. 499-509
• 2004 '[Alexander Mackay], 'MacDiarmid and Russia Revisited', in Carruthers, Gerard, Goldie, David & Renfrew, Alastair (eds.), Beyond Scotland, Rodopi, pp. 59-93
• 1998 '"We Are The Real": Bakhtin and the Representation of Speech', in Shepherd, David (ed.), The Contexts of Bakhtin, Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 121-138
• 1998 'Eux et nous: La représentation du discours dans l'oeuvre romanesque ecossaise contemporaine', in Morel, Michel (ed.), L’exil et l’allégorie dans le roman anglophone contemporain, Editions Messene, pp. 89-102
• 1997 'The Carnival Without Laughter', in Adlam, Carol, Renfrew, Alastair, Falconer, Rachel & Makhlin, Vitalii (eds.), Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 185-195
• 1997 'Them and Us? Representation of Speech in contemporary Scottish Fiction', in Renfrew, Alastair (ed.), Exploiting Bakhtin, Strathclyde Modern Language Studies, pp. 15-28

Journal papers: academic

• 2013 'Facts and Life: Osip Brik in the Soviet Film Industry', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 7.
• 2013 (co-authored with Anley, Max) 'The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Vaginov's Kozlinnaia pesn' and the Problem of the Avant-garde', Slavonica 19.
• 2012 'The Dialectics of Parody', Poetics Today 33, pp. 301-328
• 2007 'Against Adaptation? The Strange Case of (Pod) Poruchik Kizhe', Modern Language Review 102, pp. 157-176
• 2006 'A Word about Material (Bakhtin and Tynianov)', The Slavonic and East European Review 84, pp. 419-445
• 2006 'Brief Encounters, Long Farewells: Bakhtin and Scottish Literature', International Journal of Scottish Literature pp.
• 2003 'A Cult of Personality', Slavonic and East European Review 81, pp. 88-98
• 2001 'Ne vse voprosy dolzhny ostavat'sia otkrytymi. Kraine sub''ektivnye zametki o konferentsii "V otsutstvie mastera: neizvestnyi krug Bakhtina" [Not All Questions Should Remain Open: Highly Subjective Remarks on the Conference 'In the Master’s Absence: The Unknown Bakhtin Circle'', Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop 2, pp. 152-157
• 2000 'Russian Postmodernism', Slavonica 6, pp. 92-98

Other publications: research

• 2008 'Kryl'ia kholopa', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 2.
• 2003 'Why We're All Theorists Now', Times Higher Educational Supplement 14 November 2003, pp. 4

Supervises

• Mr Max Anley
• Ms Anna Hurina
• Miss Kelley Keefer
• Mrs Elizabeth Roberts
• Ms Megan Price

Grants Awarded

• 2012: The Russian Centre (£59600.00 from Russkiy Mir Foundation)
• 2009: The Humanities in Russia and the West (£12655.00 from The Leverhulme Trust)
• 2005: British Academy: £6170 for archival work on Russian and Soviet Cinema
• 2001: Arts and Humanities Research Board: £10,622 under the Research Leave Scheme for completion of a monograph on Mikhail Bakhtin and literary aesthetics
• 2000: Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland: £1970 for archival research on Valentin Voloshinov