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Biography
I studied Russian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. I went on to do a PhD at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. I taught at the University of Oxford, the University of Reading and the University of Leeds before coming to Nottingham as a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow in 2006. In 2008 I was appointed to a lectureship in Russian Studies.
Expertise Summary
- Intermediality
- Material Culture of the Book
- Visual Culture
- Natural History and Literature
- Vladimir Nabokov and exile culture
- Theatre and Performance
- epistolary culture of the First Wave Russian emigration
Teaching Summary
Myths and Memories: Histories of Russia's Second World War
Gulag Archipelago: Stalin's Prison Camps
From Tsarism to Communism: Introduction to Russian History and Culture
Russian Visual… read more
Research Summary
Much of my research focuses on questions of intermediality and the interaction between visual, material and print cultures. I have previously worked on the integration of theatrical performance in… read more
Selected Publications
FRANK, S., 2012. Nabokov's theatrical imagination Cambridge University Press.
BETHEA, D. and FRANK, S., 2011. Exile and Russian Literature. In: DOBRENKO, E. and BALINA, M., eds., The Cambridge companion to twentieth-century Russian literature Cambridge University Press. 195-213 FRANK, S., 2010. Revis(it)ing memories: photographs in Nabokov's autobiography. In: NUMANO, M. and WAKASHIMA, T., eds., Revising Nabokov revising: the proceedings of the International Nabokov Conference in Kyoto Nabokov Society of Japan. 44-49
FRANK, SIGGY, 2009. "By Nature I am No Dramatist": Theatricality in Nabokov's Fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. In: WILL NORMAN and DUNCAN WHITE, eds., Transitional Nabokov Peter Lang UK. 167-84
Current Research
Much of my research focuses on questions of intermediality and the interaction between visual, material and print cultures. I have previously worked on the integration of theatrical performance in literature and the relationship of photography and the written text in autobiography.
I'm currently developing a research project "Material texts - Textual Materials: Book and Reading Cultures" which examines the materiality of literature. Through a number of case studies, I try to delineate the relationship between the text as an intangible entity and the book as a material object. Drawing together book history, editorial practice, publishing history, studies of material culture (including collections and museum studies) and literary analysis, the project seeks to find new approaches to reading and seeing texts and books in both print and digital form.
Linked to this wider project is a collaborative case study I'm working on with Glenn Malkin, a highly regarded Fellow of the British Designer Bookbinder Society. We've been collaborating on a new book binding for Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin to explore how Nabokov's self-reflexive literary strategies can be translated into a book as a three-dimensional object. We hope that this will be the first step towards a more ambitious project which will bring together a group of book designers to explore different ways of making books visible during the reading process.
I am also researching the relationship of natural history, visual culture and literature. I am interested in the strategies by which writers draw on and subvert positivist epistemologies which are conventionally associated with specific forms of visual media: photography; cartography; optical lenses (microscopes, magic lanterns, stereoscopes) and entomological drawings. I am particularly interested in the strategies by which writers such as Nabokov or W.G. Sebald mimic different modes of seeing in their work, making the traditionally transparent observer of positivist discourse visible while implicating the reader in viewing practices which seek to control and appropriate the observed.
Another area of interest is Russian émigré culture in the twentieth century. In this connection I have published an article which examines the interaction of print and epistolary culture which facilitated the scandal that erupted in the émigré community over Nina Berberova's real or alleged conduct after the liberation of France. I have also written on the publishing and print cultures in the Russian émigré community.
Past Research
I wrote my doctoral thesis (Wolfson College, Oxford) on the interaction of theatrical performance and literary texts in Vladimir Nabokov's Russian and English fiction. My doctoral project offered a comprehensive reassessment of the importance of theatrical performance in Nabokov's thinking and writing, examining theatricality as a central structural device in Nabokov's work, which shapes and informs not only his dramatic writings but also his narrative fiction and literary criticism. Based on this doctoral research I have published a monograph: Nabokov's Theatrical Imagination (CUP, 2012).
I have also co-edited (with David Bethea) a collection of articles on Nabokov, which seeks to anchor Nabokov in the political, social and intellectual cultures his time, Vladimir Nabokov in Context (CUP, 2018).
As a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellowship I have done research on Russian theatres abroad during the interwar period. This project examined the ideology, logistics and artistic programmes which shaped the formation, organisation and creative work of Russian theatres in Berlin, Paris, Prague and New York from the 1920s to the early 1940s.