Dr Natalia (Natasha) Rulyova

• PhD (University of Cambridge)
• MPhil in European Literature (University of Cambridge)
• BA in Modern Languages (Perm State University, Russia)

In the mid-1990s, I worked as an interpreter and a translator for CARE International in Perm and for the National Democratic Institute of the Democratic Party of the USA (NDI) in Moscow. In 1997, I was granted a full bursary to do an MPhil in European Literature followed by a PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge. Upon the completion of my PhD in 2002, I had my first job as Lecturer in Russian at the University of Surrey. Two years later, I started to work as Research Fellow on the AHRC project ‘Post-Soviet Television Culture’ led by Stephen Hutchings’ at the University of Surrey. In 2006, I joined the Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham. Since 2013, I have been Russian Language Lead in the Department of Modern Languages.

I am currently teaching a range of UG and PG Russian and cross-departmental modules including: 

• Russian Core I: Cracking the Code (Beginners)
• Russian Core I: Russian Language in Context & Russian Life (Advanced)
• Fiction in Place of Public Sphere: the Golden Age of Russian Novel from Pushkin to Turgenev
• Fiction in Place of Public Sphere: the Golden Age of Russian Novel: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov
• UG Cross-Departmental Modules:
• Landmarks in European Film
• Cross-Cultural Cinema: Migration and Displacement
• Dissertation Independent Study Module
• Landmarks in European Literature
• MA Specialised Translation (Russian)
• MA Dissertations, Extended Translation Projects

Since 2015, I (co)convened, designed and delivered the following UG modules or parts of them:

• Russian Core I / II- Beginners: Russian Language in Context & Russian Life;
• Russian Core I / II - Advanced: Beyond the Basics; Russian Language in Context;
• Russian Core III-IV - Intermediate: Understanding Russia and the Russians;
• Russian Core III-IV - Advanced: Understanding Russia and the Russians;
• Russian Core VI-VII - Language and Contexts;
• Russia Unwrapped: Cultures, Contexts, Identities;
• Fiction in Place of Public Sphere
• Business Russian

New UG module to be introduced in 2021-22:

• Audio-Visual Translation

I have contributed lectures and seminars to the following PG and UG modules:

• MRes Intellectual Subversives: Culture, Counter-Culture and Radical Change, from the Late 18^th Century to the Digital Age(my sessions focused on digital age philosophies);
• UG European Media Culture(my lectures and seminars examined Russian media systems in the 20th and 21st centuries);
• UG Approaches to European Culture: Methods, Theories and Histories(two lectures and seminars on narrative analysis and how it could be applied to news narratives);
• MA Researching Russia and Eastern Europe(my sessions were research-led, focusing on post-Soviet Russian media and culture).

Dr Rulyova's research interests include:

Self-translation
Collaborative translation
Re-translation
Translation Studies
Post-Soviet Russian media and new media
Genre Studies
Joseph Brodsky's translations and self-translations

Current:

• Mukile Kasongo, PhD (2018-date) Translation of Feminist Female African Authors into Russian in Late Soviet Period, Lead Supervisor.
• Olga Kenton Ph (2018-date) Writing a piece of non-fiction about Russian Immigrants in the UK, Co-supervisor.

Successfully submitted:

• Balsam Mustafa, PhD (2014-2018) Discourses of ISIS: Translation and Dissemination of ISIS Narratives in the Arab World and in the West’. Lead Supervisor
• Asmaa Alduhaim, PhD (2014-2018) Discourses of the Arab Spring: the Translation and Dissemination of Algaddafi’s and Mubarak’s Speeches in the West and in the Arab world. Lead Supervisor
• Jade McGlynn, MA by Research (2015-2017) Memory Wars: The conflation of the Great Patriotic War with the Ukraine Conflict in Russian political and media discourse.Lead Supervisor
• Jessica Holt, MRes (2016-2017) Nation, Body, Home: Gender and National Identity in the Work of Oksana Zabuzhko. Lead Supervisor
• Victoria Hudson, PhD (2009-2013) Russian Soft Power. Co-supervisor

Find out more - our PhD Russian Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Since 2015, my research focused on developing a theory of collaborative self-translation, which emerged from my original and painstaking archival research of the bilingual work by the Russian-American Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996). My monograph Joseph Brodsky and Collaborative Translation (Bloomsbury 2020) is a significant contribution to the growing field of self-translation in translation studies and to the body of scholarly work focusing on Brodsky’s legacy because I propose to view Brodsky’s work in English as the product of multi-authored collaboration, in the course of which the poet shaped his idiosyncratic voice. A review of the book by Prof. Hodgson states that ‘The author, with an admirably light touch, guides us through the intercultural space in which Brodsky and his translators met, tussled, negotiated, and created. Rulyova succeeds in showing how collaborative translation allowed Brodsky to curate his own authentic English voice’

Prior to this, my research centred on the innovative developments in genre studies. In 2012, I was awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant (£31,616) titled‘Genre Studies Network. The interdisciplinary Genre Studies Project attracted leading scholars from the USA, Canada, Russia, Germany, Brazil and Belgium who discussed aspects of genre in the course of seven workshops organised in London and Birmingham. The workshops also created the opportunities for collaboration between scholars and practitioners including Birmingham City library practitioners, archival workers and journalists who shared their applied knowledge of genre with academics. This project resulted in the publication of the co-edited (with Garin Dowd) volume Genre Trajectories: Identifying, Mapping, Projecting (London: Palgrave, 2015), two single-authored chapters and one article in a refereed journal.

Between 2006 and 2012, I studied post-Soviet media culture with a particular focus on television texts and their reception by post-Soviet audiences. I co-authored a monograph titled Television and Culture in Putin’s Russia: Remote Control (Routledge 2009). One of the reviews states that the book ‘goes well beyond a mere discussion of Russian television during the years of Putin’s reign’ (from a review by T.J. Garza published in Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2012). I co-edited (with Stephen Hutchings and Birgit Beumers) two volumes and one special issue on post-Soviet media. Between 2007-2011, She was awarded by CEELBAS several small grants (over £14,000) to organise four networking series of events on Russian media, new media and media research methodologies, which led to the publication of the edited volume (with J. Morris and V. Strukov, eds) New Media in New Europe-Asia, Europe-Asia Studies and three single-authored articles. My expertise in post-Soviet media is evidenced by many invitations to speak on BBC programmes including BBC Radio 5, BBC 24 Hour News, and BBC World News in April-March 2018. I contributed to The Conversation (and was invited to take part in a UoB podcast.

Other professional appointments

• Expert Reviewer at the National Science Centre, Poland (NCN), 2020
• Registered Practitioner at the Higher Education Academy, UK, 26 May 2006
• Member of The British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES)

Grants

• 2015 CEELBAS grant (£3,967) Leading Applicant, for organising a research network workshop on Collaborative Translation and Self-Translation at the University of Birmingham on 23 January 2016
• 2015 CEELBAS grant (£1,100) Leading Applicant, for developing links with U.S. universities in the area of Russian studies and translation, including the University of Yale, Amherst College and Temple University.
• 2012 AHRC Research Networking grant (over £30,000) for organising Genre Studies Network (see details above)
• 2011 CEELBAS grant (£1,032), Leading Applicant, for organising a one-day workshop Genre in Contemporary Russian Culture. School of Government and Society research and KT activities grant, University of Birmingham (£500), an additional grant to further support the above-mentioned one-day workshop’
• 2009 CEELBAS grant (£5,000) for organising two one-day workshops under the umbrella New Media in New Europe-Asia. March 2010-May 2010
• 2007 CEELBAS grant (£3,342) received jointly with Prof. Hutchings, leading applicant, of the University of Manchester for one-day workshop on media research methodologies, and for the establishment and maintenance of a web forum onto which recordings of the workshop contributions would be uploaded as part of a larger, longer-term initiative in post-Soviet media research (see http://bscw.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/). October 2007-April 2008
• 2007 CEELBAS grant (£5,000) received jointly with Prof. Hutchings, leading applicant, of the University of Manchester, for a series of three debates on the media: 1) ‘Media and Free Speech in Post-Soviet Russia’ held at the University of Manchester; 2) ‘Russian New Media and Civil Society’ held at the University of Birmingham; 3) ‘Media and the War on Terror’ held in London. February-May

Teaching awards

2009 received a teaching award as part of the Russian Language team, University of Birmingham